Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance
by Doc Professor
Summary: After a zombie plague has wiped out most of humanity, Nami is living in a settlement with her family. When hope of a cure emerges, Nami finds herself caught up in a grand journey that will risk all she has- oh forget it. Let's not get fancy here. This is a story about a bunch of losers just trying to make it in a post-apocalyptic world. (NOW WITH: EPILOGUE!) LuNa, Coby/Vivi
1. Chapter 1

Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance

Chapter 1

Nami was sitting in the back of a police car. Staring out the window at the Boston streets she had become horridly accustomed to these past 16 years, she was only vaguely half-listening to the policewoman driving her to the station. There was an icy chill through the car, and it wasn't just because the air conditioner was on too high.

"It's not just you who has to deal with this," the officer said after a few seconds of silence. "I have to put up with it too. Okay? It's my reputation on the line. I don't want to be the cop with the convict daughter."

"I get it, Mom."

"Hey Belle, how's your daughter? Did she light any more fires recently? How many bikes has she stolen now, a dozen?"

"I've never committed arson and I've only stolen one bike. It's not that big a deal."

Bellemere sucked in a breath, biting her tongue to keep the frustration down. She exhaled sharply through her nose, "It IS a big deal, Nami! This is the stuff that can drastically affect your future! You're young, you're smart! You can do anything you want! You are a bright! Clever! Intelligent-" she punctuated each word by slapping the steering wheel with her hand "-Young woman and it just... it breaks my heart to see you like this!"

Nami had completely zoned her mother out at this point. When Bellemere got into the "hearbreaking" part of her spiel, it was time to stop listening and find a way to distract yourself. They were stopped at a red light at an intersection when Bellemere turned around in her seat. "Nami! Are you even listening to me?!"

She snapped back into reality with a start, "Yeah! Yeah I'm listening, sheesh!"

Bellemere didn't look convinced. "Then what was the last thing I just said?"

There was a horrible second of awkward silence that felt like an eternity, until Nami saw her salvation. "The light's green, Mom," she said, hoping it would be a sufficient distraction from her mother's grilling tactics.

It was not. The second Bellemere turned around and resumed driving, she repeated, "What was the last thing I said?"

Nami was about to make a wild guess when she was saved once more. But this time it was thanks to the sound of gunshots in the distance. Nami's elation at being spared more of her mom's lecture quickly deflated when her conscience kicked back in and reminded her that- because they did not live in the deep south- gunshots in the distance were a sign of trouble.

Bellemere's head quickly turned in the direction the shots came from and Nami had to shout, "MOM!" in order to get her head to focus back on the road to avoid the man who had run in front of her car. Bellemere slammed on the brakes, barely hitting him, but still knocking him flat on his ass. Before she could get out to make sure he was okay, he was already on his feet, running away from the gunshots they heard earlier.

He was followed by several more people, fleeing in a panic, shoving each other out of the way. Some of them, Nami could see, were bleeding from awful-looking wounds, limping and collapsing to the ground.

They were stopped in the middle of the intersection, and the people rushing by made driving forward almost impossible. Bellemere opened the door and said as sternly as possible, "Stay. Here."

This would end up being a mistake. Spoilers.

Bellemere ran for one of the fleeing citizens, grabbing him by the shoulders and standing in front of him to keep him from running. "Sir, sir, I need you to calm down. I'm a police officer, tell me what's going on. Are you injured?"

"Sh-she bit me!" he managed to stammer out in ragged breaths. He held his forearm up, showing a distinct human bite mark. A literal chunk of skin had been bitten off and there appeared to be some kind of rash spreading from the wound itself. "That crazy-... They were all biting everyone over there!"

"Who was biting who? Sir, do you need me to call-" and that's as far as she got when she heard the squealing tires behind her.

There are those awful moments in life that are made doubly worse by the fact that time seems to slow down. In those moments, you really do take in all the worst details of the incident. Bellemere whirled around and managed to take note of everything in the few seconds she had. A car screaming down the street toward the intersection. Its hood and windshield already covered in blood and a human body. The brakes screaming as the driver tried in vain to stop. The crunch of metal as it t-boned her police car.

The police car her daughter was currently occupying.

Nami, thankfully, didn't have the same sense of looming despair in slow motion. For her, it mostly went screaming, squealing brakes, crunch, nothing.

Oh yeah and then a sudden, violent shove back into the world of the conscious. Nami awoke with blood in her eye, pain in her forehead and limbs, and a vague disorientation that can come from nearly being killed in a car wreck. The sounds of gunshots and people screaming helped jar her awake, as well as someone's arm reaching out for her and grabbing her shoulder.

"Nami! Nami, oh thank God you're awake!" The voice belonged to her mother and as Nami blinked the haziness away and regained her vision, she could see Bellemere wasn't looking too good herself. There was blood on the front of her uniform and her gun was drawn. A hand seemed to emerge from her back, reaching around to grab her shoulder and Bellemere was quick to elbow its owner in the side. "Get OFF!"

Her attacker fell backwards onto the ground and Bellemere didn't even hesitate to point her gun at his head and pull the trigger. "Holy shit, Mom!" Nami screamed. Bellemere stared at her daughter in confusion and shook her head.

"Oh, right! No it's okay sweetie, he wasn't alive anymore. Can you move? We need to get out of here now."

"What do you mean he wasn't alive?" Nami asked while reaching for Bellemere's outstretched hand. When she climbed out of the wreckage, she turned around to survey the damage. The left side of the police car had been smashed in, and the front of the car that hit her was a crumpled mess. Its driver was through the windshield, cut to hell and back on broken glass. But he was still moving. Making weak lunges toward Nami as though he didn't know he was still held back by his seatbelt.

Looking around, she could see a group of three people hunched over a body, ripping off chunks of flesh and devouring them. A handful of people, bleeding from gaping wounds, and stumbling mindlessly on weak legs. Blood splattered on the streets and sidewalks, people running in every direction in a desperate panic.

"Oh my God..." was all Nami could mutter. "They're zombies. They're... They're actually zombies."

"I know," came Bellemere's oddly calm response. "I've been waiting for you to wake up so we could haul ass out of here. We've gotta get home and get Nojiko. Find somewhere safe to hole up. Wait for help or... more realistically, try to establish our own survivor group."

Holding the wound in her forehead, Nami stumbled forward, trying to grasp the concept of walking dead. "How... How long was I out?"

Bellemere lit a cigarette and placed it between her lips. "Oh... About ten minutes?"

"Ten min- IT GOT THIS BAD IN TEN MINUTES?!"

Her mother just shrugged. "Yeah I dunno what to tell you, honey. Things really escalated." She grabbed Nami's wrist and pulled her away from the car, gun in one hand, leading her towards their house, which was several blocks away. It was going to be a long walk.

And so, in essence, that was the start of the end of the world.

Okay, not the entire world, don't worry. Some of it's still there. It wouldn't be much fun if everyone was dead, you know?

You've probably all heard the story in some way or another. The basic rundown is, someone got sick, died, came back with a taste for human flesh. Next thing you know, there's panic in a crowded hospital, and then that panic spread to the streets, into the cities, across the nation, and then across the world. Patient Zero sprang violently into our world five years ago, on what most refer to as "Zombie Day". Things have mostly calmed down now. Those who have survived have migrated past the first desperate years of clinging to supplies and sacrificing morals just to survive. None of this is really too important, though. No one really cares HOW a zombie virus came about, that's why media tends to skip over it.

So what happened to Nami? And her mother? Are they okay? Did they get devoured between then and now? Is Nami some kind of decoy protagonist? Where you just start to get attached to the character in the intro, and then in a surprise twist she's dramatically killed off?

No.

That would be dumb.

She's fine. But five years is a long time, so let's catch up.

After Zombie Day, Bellemere utilized her natural leadership skills, endless charisma, and survival abilities to become the head of a ragtag group of colorful survivors from all walks of life. Nami and her sister Nojiko accompanied their mother and this group on all sorts of heartwarming and/or tragic adventures. They learned how to survive. They made difficult decisions. Not all of them would last, of course. But it seemed whenever some of them would die to the zombie hordes or a gunfight with another group, it wouldn't be long before new strangers would arrive to join them. It was like some kind of cosmic hand was manipulating events to keep the total group number at a reasonable number so that interpersonal dynamics would always be interesting.

After a few years, Bellemere would find herself reestablishing a community just outside of the city. She led her people to reclaim a small suburb from the undead and establish walls and fences to keep out the herds. It was safe, it was civil, they had a good patrol system to check the walls for any damages. On the zombie prevention front, they were doing pretty well for themselves.

On the people front, they'd get travelers every so often. Caravans of people on horseback or the occasional car. Some would stay, some would trade supplies and be on their way. In a way, it was kind of like going back to the days of the old west, but with less desert and cowboy hats and more corpses. And yes, of course there were the occasional shootouts or battles between Bellemere's town and some other pocket of survivors looking to ransack their town. It was always an annoyance when that happened, Bellemere was more than willing to negotiate, but sometimes the only trade that could be made was bullet for bullet, being delivered at high speeds directly into someone's eyeball.

So, despite everything that's happened, Nami had gone from a normal troublemaking life to a hell on earth, and ended up back in relative peace with her family. She had obviously changed, though. She learned how to use a gun, how to navigate silently. How to listen. All the most basic survival skills necessary for the world beyond the walls. Often she would go on raids or small trading expeditions. But she'd never stray too far from the town. Nami did make it a habit to collect maps. Maps of the country she'd get from travelers, which she would study until she had memorized the routes traced into them. She would often daydream about finding the one thing that would push her to leave the town, see what the rest of the world has to offer. But nothing significant ever came her way.

Which catches us up all the way to the present. Where a stranger comes to town.


	2. Chapter 2

Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance

Chapter 2

Nami and Nojiko were on front gate duty the morning the visitors arrived. They were always on front gate duty in the morning. It was the cushiest, easiest job with some actual significant importance in the entire town. And as the daughters of the sheriff/mayor/queen/whatever Bellemere felt like addressing herself as, they had the special privilege of getting front gate duty every morning.

Front gate duty was simple. It involved sitting in lawn chairs on a balcony above the front gate and waiting for someone to approach the town. And to show their heartfelt, courageous dedication to the people of their town, Nami and Nojiko tended to use the mornings to lounge around in their swimsuits and work on their tans. When someone did approach the town, they would determine whether they were alive or dead.

If they were alive, the next step was to greet them and offer them sanctuary if they so want. Then, Nami and/or Nojiko would ask that the traveler turn over their guns to ensure the safety of the people. The next step would be to again ask that the traveler turn over their guns. The third step is to repeat, this time with more insistence, that the traveler please turn over their guns for the safety and comfort of the townspeople. THEN, one of the girls would call their mother over the radio. Bellemere would then personally come to the gate and repeat the demand that the traveler stop being a whiny little baby about their guns and just turn them over already.

This would happen every time someone new approached the town.

If the person approaching the gate was dead, the girls would wait until they were in brick droppin' distance and then drop a brick on them.

On this particular morning, Nojiko was the one actually performing lookout duties while Nami lounged back in her lawn chair. She saw them approaching on the horizon. First as a moving blur of darkness and then, when she reached for her binoculars and looked again, saw them with clarity.

There were ten of them in total. All of them walking forward in unison, as though they were one mind shared between many bodies. Each of them was clad in a black cloak, with a hood pulled down to cover their eyes. They were positioned in a circle. Nine around and one in the center, a woman as far as Nojiko could tell. The cloaks made it difficult to highlight any physical differences. Four of them were visibly armed with assault rifles. Each in the "cardinal directions" of this human compass. None of them appeared to be talking to each other. They walked with their heads down, as though they were under no looming threat of undead.

"Oh my God..." Nojiko gasped, lowering her binoculars. "Nami... You've gotta see this."

"See what?" Nami opened her eyes and sat up. Nojiko passed her the binoculars without taking her eyes off the road.

"Look out there. Look at how freaking stupid those Drama Kids look."

Nami practically fell out of the chair scrambling to lean over the wall. The second she laid eyes on these travelers, she burst into laughter. "Where the hell do you even FIND ten identical black cloaks?!"

"They look like idiots. Don't they know it's a zombie apocalypse? Dress normal, you assholes," Nojiko said, adjusting her bikini bottoms.

The girls waited for the group to approach the wall and when they were within speaking distance, Nami offered a friendly wave. "Heeeyyy, welcome to Funkytown."

"Yes it's named after the song. Our leader is 40," Nojiko chimed in when the group didn't say anything. After some additional silence, she spoke up again. "If you want to come in, you're going to have to hand over your guns for the time being. Just a safety precaution."

The one in front, "South" if we're going by the compass pattern established earlier, was the one to remove his hood and look up to the girls. He was the only on carrying something besides an assault rifle. In his left hand was a tattered briefcase. He had a face that looked like he was constantly upset with every teenager's taste in music and his hair was shock white. A scar ran down his forehead, through his right eye, and down under his ear, and in his mouth was an actual lit cigar. Which was a far more impressive fashion accessory in the post-apocalypse than synchronized cloaks.

"I am Major Smoker of the Canadian Armed Forces. I'm here in need of supplies and potential aid on a mission that may determine the course of humanity's very survival. I request that I speak with whoever is in charge of this settlement," he spoke like a tin can filled with gasoline. But one that commanded authority.

"Is Smoker your first or last name?" Nami asked.

"Like we said, you're going to need to surrender your weapons if you want to enter the town. It's our policy and we don't budge on it, not even for Canadian army guys," Nojiko said.

I'm going to go ahead and save you the hassle of reading this entire conversation because, as previously mentioned, it pretty much played out the way it always does. Just imagine a constant stream of someone saying "yes" and another person saying "no" and you have the gist of what took place. Eventually Smoker threw his hands up, "Yes! Please! Please bring your leader over here! I would LOVE to talk to someone who isn't wearing a bikini!"

"Dude are you totally creeping on us?" Nami asked as Nojiko fiddled with the walkie talkie.

"That's gross you're like 60 or something and we're 20. You're gross," Nojiko followed up, turning away so she could talk to Bellemere.

"I have never hated people as much as I hate the two of you. I have killed men with my bare hands that I hated less than you two."

He screamed, legitimately screamed aloud when the gates swung open and Bellemere was standing in the entrance. He screamed because she too was wearing a bikini, although she was at least also wearing shorts and an open blouse. Because even though she knew she was still hot, she did also want to create an air of professionalism.

"Well if you're just going to be rude by yelling all the time, maybe we don't want you in our town," she said, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

Smoker dragged his hands across his face. He turned to the rest of his group and gestured silently at them, pointing to Bellemere with a confused look on his face. They nodded in union and he turned back to her. "As I said before, to your... guards. I'm Major Smoker of the Canadian Armed Forces and I am on an important mission. I request supplies and aid."

"I am too," Bellemere replied.

"You're what?"

"A major smoker. Do you want cigs? Because I can totally get you cigarettes. Maybe a little iffy on getting cigars though."

"No, that's my name and rank. I'm a major named Smoker."

"Ohhhhhhhh... Well, as long as you turn your guns in, you're still more than welcome to come in."

Smoker gritted his teeth so hard they were liable to crack under the pressure. "Fffffffine. Take the guns. And let's do business."

Bellemere preferred doing business in the comfort of her own home and thus led the hooded figures down the street where everyone could see them. Strange enough, not a one of them looked uncomfortable or awkward being stared at. Only Smoker seemed irritated, but then again he seemed irritated at everything ever, so it was hard to tell if this irritation was unique or it was just another part of his general attitude.

Nami and Nojiko were relieved of their post during the shift change and both immediately followed after their mother, interested in the conversation to be. Like they were six years old again, they leaned into the doorway, their heads poking into the kitchen like the Scooby-Doo gang.

Inside, Bellemere and Smoker sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table, the rest of his party hovering behind him. She took a moment to really analyze them. She'd seen weirdos before, but none of them were really this committed to the act. Despite Smoker's attitude, even he seemed on board with the black cloak look. He was wearing it at least.

"So, important uh... Mission. Let's talk about that first, shall we?" she asked, genuinely curious.

Smoker said nothing at first, glaring at her and she started to feel like she was the one being grilled, not the other way around. "Look, I want to know what the deal is! I want to make sure my supplies aren't going to some kind of... I don't know. Death... cult."

"We are not a death cult," the hooded figures all said simultaneously. "We are the opposite of that. We worship life and revitalization."

Bellemere practically fell out of her chair when they spoke, clearly not expecting a monotone, simultaneous response from everyone but Smoker. He raised his hand to stop them without taking his eyes off Bellemere. "Robin, show her."

"Are you su- Oh!" the group again spoke in unison before one of the members hastily removed her hood. The one that had been standing in the center of the circle earlier, a woman with black hair cut short and olive skin. "Are you sure?" She asked again, this time without the input of the others.

"Yes. Wait," he leaned in to focus on Bellemere. "You aren't currently armed, are you?"

She held up her empty hands to show a lack of hidden guns.

"Yes, show her."

The one identified as Robin stepped out of the group and held up her left arm. She pulled the sleeve of her cloak down, revealing a loose-fitting bandage around her forearm. She removed it slowly, revealing a pink, disfiguring scar, long since healed as well as it would.

"Yeesh... That doesn't look good. What's that from?"

"A bite," Robin said as plainly as possible. "Two years ago."

"... Ho-ho-hold on what? No you're shitting me. That's not possible. Bites are fatal within like two hours."

"There's no one who is more aware of that than me," Robin responded. She held out her arm so Bellemere could take a better look. "I had to watch everyone else in my group either turn or get devoured when it happened. They tore a chunk out of my arm and then left me alone. So here I am."

"She has been blessed. Touched by life and thus will save all people from the curse of the rot," the group spoke again.

Smoker nodded in agreement. "It took us a long time, but we managed to gather some of her medical records as well," he said, raising the briefcase he had been carrying. "Two years we've been working, traveling around Canada to have doctors look at her. Now we're ready for the final push."

"Last we checked, the CDC down in Georgia was still operational. If I can get down there, maybe... Maybe they can develop something. A vaccine," Robin said, covering her arm back up.

Bellemere was entranced by the story, nodding her head in understanding. "And the... hood guys?"

Robin looked back at the group hovering behind her. "Oh, they think I'm some kind of deity and they protect me. I'm not going to tell them I'm not."

"Nico Robin is our hope, our salvation. She must be protected at all costs."

"Totally seems legit. SO!" Bellemere clapped her hands and focused her attention back on Smoker. "What can I do for YOU?"

Smoker seemed a bit taken aback. "Wait, you believe us? About the vaccine? About her being immune? About her being blessed by God?"

"Yes, yes, yes, and I don't know but I'm not going to say anything negative about a person's religion. You obviously need some supplies and there are easier ways to go about getting them than dressing up and making up some immunity story. So... What can we do to help get Robin's butt down to Atlanta?"

The old man was clearly not prepared for someone so agreeable and he sat up straighter. "Well. We did prepare a list, so... Anything you could provide would be helpful?" Reaching into the inside of his cloak, he produced a shopping list written on loose-leaf paper. He handed it to Bellemere and she unfolded it, reading it aloud.

"Let's see here... Cars... Ehhhhh yeeeeaahh we could give you a van or two... Should fit all of you. Canned goods... Well we've got our gardens so I guess we could spare some. Bullets... You'd have to talk to Usopp about that. He's our armory guy. Medicine? Yeesh, that'll be tricky. Aaaand... What's this? Navigator? What's that mean?"

"We need someone who can read maps," Robin explained. "We're not really familiar with US roads and with all the abandoned cars blocking parts of the freeway, we can't just make a straight shot down to Atlanta."

"Someone willing to come along and help save the world, you know? Big glory and name in a history book?" Smoker offered.

Bellemere leaned back in her chair, taking a long drag on her cigarette. "Weeeeellll... I don't know. We don't really have anyone in this town who can read maps... We tend to stay pretty stationary. Not a lot of travel here in Funkytown."

"That's bullshit, I read maps all the time!" Nami suddenly called out from hiding behind the doorway, waving her arm to get the group's attention. "I've studied every atlas and travel map the settlers bring in! I can get you guys to Atlanta!"

With a roll of the eyes, Bellemere waved her hand to dismiss her daughter and her ideas. "Well okay yeah there is Nami but she's obviously not going to accompany anyone anywhere."

"No I'm totally capable of going to Atlanta with them. I can map out a route and like a dozen alternate routes if need be," she said, stepping into the kitchen.

"Well yes, you CAN do that but you're not GOING to because you're not leaving."

"Who said I'm not leaving? I'm not in jail."

"You're not leaving because your mother says you aren't leaving."

Smoker and Robin suddenly stood up from the table. "You said to talk to Usopp about the bullets, so we're gonna go do that. You two... take care of this and get back to us," Smoker said, Robin and he putting their hoods back on to join the collective and simultaneously move out of the kitchen.

Bellemere and her family were alone in the kitchen, and without taking her eyes off Nami, Bellemere waved Nojiko over. "Back me up here. Tell your sister she's crazy for wanting to go out."

She hesitated to step forward, slinking in like a dog that had gotten in the trash. "Well, I mean I do have something to say. But you aren't gonna like it."

At that, Bellemere's head snapped to her older daughter, causing Nojiko to flinch a little. "I uh, I think Nami should go."

"You traitor! I raised you better than this!" Bellemere shouted.

"Yeah, you're right. You raised us better. That's why I want to do this, Mom." Nami took a deep breath, "Because you spent all this time teaching us that we need to go out and do the right thing when we can. And now I can make a difference. Like, if there was anything that was The Right Thing, this is it."

"Okay, well... you need to do as I do, not as I say!" Bellemere stammered, crossing her arms in front of her. Not as an act of defiance, but more as a defense mechanism, holding herself tightly.

Nojiko just shook her head. "That doesn't work either, Mom."

"You founded this town on the basis of how punk rock it is to form a community out of people in need of help. That's the whole reason we have our job system."

Bellemere was clearly starting to lose the battle, but quitting in the face of sure defeat was just lame. "I've spent the last five years trying to keep you safe and if you go out there, if you leave us behind, then I can't protect you anymore! It's too dangerous."

"Mom, EVERYTHING is dangerous! You can't keep us safe no matter what! As long as we've got zombies out there turning other people into zombies, it'll never be safe. But if I go with them and help them fix all of this, then it'll be over! I can't just let this pass by, we can't just send them on their way and hope they don't get lost."

Bellemere started biting her lower lip, looking down at the floor. After a while, Nami continued. "And here's the other thing, Mom. I'm 21. I don't ACTUALLY need your permission to go with them. I'm an adult."

"You're not an adult! That's not adulthood! You can't make life decisions at 21!"

"You adopted us when you were 21," Nojiko unhelpfully pointed out.

"STOP IT! Stop being such smartasses all the time! Who taught you how to do that?!"

"YOU DID!" both Nojiko and Nami yelled simultaneously.

Sighing, Bellemere's shoulders slumped and she lifted her head to look at Nami. "I'm not gonna win this, am I...? This is my own damn fault for being too good a mother. I raised you too well. Why couldn't you end up getting tattoos and thinking the crack cocaine was a fun thing to do? Look, just... Be safe. Be smart. Do everything you can to come home, okay? Just promise me that."

"I promise, Mom. You taught me everything I need to know. I know how to shoot, how to fight, how to hunt. How to survive. I'm gonna make it home."

"You'd better. I am not going to go look for your zombie and tearfully pull the trigger while you look at me and perhaps ambiguously show a glimmer of your former self before dying." Bellemere was the only person they had met who could make movie cliches into legitimate fears.

And so, by the next morning, Nami was among the group loading up two vans with supplies. Nojiko had, for the first time in her life, passed on taking the morning shift at the gate just so she could say goodbye to her sister.

"This doesn't mean you're joining the cult, are you?" she asked after hugging Nami.

"Oh, I didn't really think about that. Does this mean I'm part of your cult thing?!" She called out to the group who were, in unison, loading up the van exactly like a group of Pikmin.

"No, because we do not have any spare robes," they said together. Nami nodded and shrugged to her sister.

Smoker was the only one not wearing his hood, as he needed to be autonomous to mark down inventory and look over the maps Nami had prepared the night before. She had mapped out alternate routes, possible hazards based on word-of-mouth from travelers, as well as estimated times of arrival depending on which route they ended up taking. "This is all very impressive for someone I hate. Do you have any other tricks?"

Nami nonchalantly looked at her fingernails, one hand on her hip. "Well, not to brag or anything, but my current score is 593. So you know, there's that."

Nojiko was quick to raise her hand in protest. "Don't think that's too impressive. We cleared out our mom's police station one day so subtract like 120 points from that."

"Hey, shut up! That's not- Wait, you guys know what we're talking about right? You keep score in Canada, right?" Nami asked.

Smoker rolled his eyes. "Yes, we keep score. I don't, but there are people that do. Still, that's not bad I guess."

When the sun was up so that it wouldn't be in anyone's eyes while they were driving, the vans were loaded and Bellemere was hugging Nami for a ridiculous length of time. Again, she was repeating to Nami to stay safe and come back and she'll never feel comfortable until Nami is back in Funkytown. And again, Nami was telling her that she'll be safe and careful and not to worry too much.

The cultists had faced a minor dilemma. With two cars, they could not converge as one group and were all forced to remove their hoods in order to comfortably disperse. It weirded Nami out a little to see that underneath it all they were just normal people who happened to worship the same thing. There was a lesson in there about how religion can bring together the most different of people but it was lost under Smoker's desire to leave as soon as possible. "The faster we get to Atlanta, the faster we can save the world."

Nami looked back at the town as she rode with Smoker, Robin, and three other cultists. It occurred to her that she had rarely ever seen the gate from the outside perspective. The sight of it, she decided, would stick with her until she would see it again, coming back home.

For now, there was a lot of ground to cover and while technically infinite time to do it, they all still felt the pressure to hurry. Not that there wouldn't be interruptions, but we'll get to that in the next chapter.


	3. Chapter 3

Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance

Chapter 3

As far as Luffy was concerned, he was the last person left alive on Earth. Now, you know that's not true and I know that's not true, but he didn't. It's not like he didn't have a good reason for believing it. For the past four years or so, he hadn't seen a single living soul. He'd seen plenty of the dead, of course. But even now they were becoming less and less frequent.

He also didn't know it had been four years, but we do and that's what's important.

After Zombie Day, the state of various cities across the country varied wildly. Some managed to get some structure going, like Boston. Some managed to stay mostly intact, like Las Vegas. And some ended up falling completely. Like New York.

To put it bluntly, New York went to shit fast. The city was crowded as hell and the infection spread quickly in the panic. Any sort of mounted assault to reclaim the city quickly fell to the ever-spreading horde and caught in the middle of it all was a 15 year old kid. Somehow, through dumb luck, sheer determination, physical might, or some combination of the three, Luffy had managed to drag his ass out of every deadly situation the zombies had put him in. Roving bands of raiders, he'd either manage to outscramble or in some cases, just straight up beat down with his fists.

As time went on, the groups of survivors started to dwindle. People started to migrate out of the city and raiders stopped coming in to steal what remained. But Luffy remained. Despite everything, Luffy remained. Even as the dead stopped crowding the streets, ambling away in search of food, leaving only a few pockets that didn't have the brainpower to navigate the maze-like streets of the greatest city on earth.

The survivors that packed up and left spread the word. How it was dead, how nothing remained. New York was nothing now, don't even bother trying to find a home there.

So the people stopped trying to drive to New York. Logically, Luffy told himself, this meant that no one was left. It was him and a dead city.

Nami was behind the wheel of the van, leading the other through New York's once-crowded streets. Robin was in the passenger seat, keeping her company. Or rather, keeping her awake. Their decision to drive through the night meant less chance of being surrounded while they slept, and was also much easier to pull off with a large group of rotating drivers. Smoker and the others had all passed out some time ago and without any radio to keep her alert, Nami needed a copilot.

There's another important thing to remember here, and that is with the lack of local law enforcement and people actually on the road, traffic laws were a thing of the past. So Robin wasn't actually too concerned with the fact that Nami was looking at one of her maps while she was driving. "I've always wanted to see New York," Nami muttered, a small flashlight between her teeth so she could see which street she needed to turn down next.

"I'm glad we ended up coming this way too. Although I imagine it was much more beautiful five years ago."

"Everything was more beautiful five years ago. Except for me. I was skinny and had acne and now I'm hot as hell," Nami said, using her leg to keep the wheel straight and tracing their next route with her finger. Many of the streets were blocked off by abandoned cars, forcing Nami to take it slow and watch out for roadblocks.

Luffy stood dumbfounded in the middle of the road. It took him a while to recognize the sound of a running car engine. Zombies can't drive cars, of course. That would just be stupid. It had been years since he heard that sound. It had been years since he had seen functioning headlights. There was that time a while ago when he thought about trying to drive one of the cars, making navigating the city a bit safer, but that idea was quickly dashed when he remembered cars needed keys.

But it was still a car. A functioning car being driven by someone. Someone who was ALIVE. And if there was someone else alive, that meant he wasn't al-

Thud was the sound he made when the car hit him and knocked him flat on his back.

"HOLY SHIT!" Nami screamed inside the car.

"I told you there was someone in the middle of the road!" Robin screamed back.

"Oh shit shit shit... Shiiit not again..." She was already unbuckling her seatbelt and fumbling with the door.

"Not again? What does that mean?" Robin asked as Nami fled from the car, dropping to her knees in front of the guy she hit. The others were starting to wake up, either from the sound of Nami screaming or the impact of her hitting a person with a van.

"What the hell? Why are we stopped?" Smoker asked, blinking and looking around.

"Nami hit someone with the van," came Robin's reply.

"I THINK HE'S ALIVE!" Nami called out. She put her ear to his chest, hoping to hear a heartbeat and let out a relieved sigh when she felt it. "Hooooly shit, I'm so glad you're alive. Oh man..."

"Good," Smoker said, turning back over and closing his eyes. "Tell her to dump him in a safe building and let's get on with it."

Robin shot him a dirty look. "Nice," and as if to spite him, she got out of the van herself to check on the poor victim.

At first, Luffy thought he was looking at the light he was meant to walk into. He couldn't quite make out any other details and the dull pain in his chest became more and more of a reality. So, logically, he must be dead. It would also explain the beautiful angel looking down on him. Glowing orange hair fell off of her shoulders in waves, and he willed his hand to move slowly, if nothing more than to just touch, if only for a moment, the ethereal beauty of her hair.

"Holy shit you're awake! Oh my God I'm so sorry I hit you. Are you okay? Do you have brain damage?"

Wait a minute, angels don't swear.

Luffy tried to take a deep breath, causing pain to spread through his chest and forcing him more awake. He blinked away the haziness in his vision and found that his angel wasn't an angel. Not a literal one at least, she was just a girl about his age, staring down at him. And the heavenly light was just her flashlight she was using to get a better look at him.

"Can you talk?"

He responded by coughing. Oh he could talk, he talked to himself all the time. It was the only way he could hear words these days. It didn't do much good now, the sheer shock of actually seeing living people kept his brain from firing properly and kept his mouth from moving in the right way. Even now, half of the things his angel-but-not-really was saying didn't quite register at first.

He tried sitting up, and with a bit of effort, made it so he could support himself on his palms. His breathing was still rough, but she looked a little relieved. Another beam of light bounced in his peripheral vision. Turning toward it, he saw another woman approaching them. "How is he?"

"Well, he's not one of them. How many are around?" Orange-hair asked.

"Just a few. They haven't noticed us yet, but we shouldn't stick around here in the open," Black-hair said. She similarly kneeled down in front of Luffy to look him over.

"I think I might've like, stunned him or something. He's not talking."

Black-hair stared into his eyes. "Parlez-vous Francais?"

Oh right, there were OTHER languages, that's right. Now it was starting to come back to him.

When he stared dumbfounded at her, she shrugged her shoulders. "Well, that's all I can do."

Luffy tried remembering how to form his mouth into shapes to produce intelligible sounds, and finally managed to choke out "I can talk!"

"Oh! Thank God! I'm Nami, that's Robin. What's your name?" orange-hair introduced herself.

Luffy nodded, taking her hand when she reached out to him, letting her pull him to his feet. "I'm Luffy. Are you real?" he hadn't let go of her hand yet, squeezing it to confirm that he was actually touching a person. "Or are you a... What's the thing. Where you see things that aren't real?"

"A hallucination?" Robin suggested.

"No, the other thing. Where you see things but they aren't really there."

Nami raised an eyebrow, gently pulling her hand away from his. "That's a hallucination. Listen, Luffy, you're obviously a little disoriented, do you have a safe house or people nearby? Somewhere we can drop you off?"

He looked around, reconfirming his location. Following the buildings with his eyes, he held out a finger and turned in place, mentally mapping out the route he took to get himself in car-hitting zone. "Riiiight there," he finally said, pointing down a street to their left. "I have a house there. Around the corner."

"Right on. HEY SMOKER!" Nami suddenly turned and yelled back to the van.

From inside came a call of "WHAT?!"

"WE'RE GONNA TAKE THIS KID HOME SO JUST SIT TIGHT FOR A BIT!"

"OH COME ON!" came the annoying whiny groan of a 48 year old man.

"I'm the Messiah and I'm helping this poor child so shut up and stop complaining!" came Robin's response.

"FINE. I hate both of you."

"Asshole. Alright, anyway. Why don't you show us where you live?" Nami asked, turning back to Luffy. She offered him her shoulder to lean on and he did so. Not necessarily because he was hurt. Well, he was hurt but not bad enough that he couldn't walk. But mostly he was still stunned that he was experiencing human contact and wanted to milk it for all its worth.

Nami and Robin were still wondering how a kid like Luffy could survive this long, especially considering they had seen no signs of any other civilization. Nami of course had heard that New York was empty, and she had believed it until a few minutes ago. Their answer came when they turned the street corner and saw the house he was most likely referring to.

It wasn't really a house, it actually looked more like a small convenience store. One of those little places that smelled kind of musty but the owners were nice and it was like the only place around that still sold those weird snacks you like so much. That kind of store.

It absolutely made sense that Luffy could avoid the undead in a place like that, considering the barricaded windows, the large wooden stakes jutting out of the ground at an outward angle all along the store's walls, the alleyways on either side blocked off by assorted trash and scrap metal heaped in piles. It was lit up just barely with two tiki torches, the kind used to keep mosquitoes away but were useless at repelling zombies, attached to the wall at either side of the front door.

The tiki torches proved their uselessness as a form of defense by highlighting the corpse leaning against the doorway, clawing lazily at the boarded door.

"I'll get it-" Nami started to say, but was cut off by chuckling from Luffy.

"Eeehehehehe! Heeheehee! Look at that idiot! Doesn't he know there's no one inside? Pfff these things are so dumb," he pulled away from Nami's shoulder and walked up to the zombie like it was nothing.

"Luffy, I don't think that's a good..." Robin trailed off as Luffy suddenly grabbed the ghoul by the shoulders and slammed it forward, bashing its face against the planks of wood covering the door. He did that once more, shattering the thing's skull open and yet it still groaned out. Trying to reach behind it at the fresh meat, even as he dragged it away from the door, to one of the wooden spikes on the wall. He shoved its shoulders forward, forcing its broken skull onto the spike, piercing its brain into mush and taking off most of its head along with it. The body slumped motionless to the ground as bits of brain and skull slid off the spike.

"Stupid. Ehehehe..." Luffy resumed giggling to himself as he moved back to the door. "The store's locked up anyway, he couldn't get in without a key."

He unlocked the door and cheerfully waved back at Nami and Robin. "You wanna come in for a bit?"

They couldn't think of a good reason not to.

Inside, the store had been completely cleared out of shelves, except for those haphazardly mounted on the wall, leaving it much like a single-room apartment. There was a cot in the corner, a couch opposite of it. Cans of food strewn about, some opened and empty, some not. Nami and Robin wouldn't have said Luffy was living in style, but he was certainly living.

He dropped himself on the couch, laying on his back, and forced a deep breath. "Aahhh man, this still hurts a bit. Might have to take it easy for a few days..."

Nami sat down next to his feet, "So you just live here by yourself?"

"Yeah! Of course, everyone else is dead!" he said that with a bit too much cheer. "Well, except for you I guess! I'm so glad some others made it through!"

"Made it through?"

"Yeah! The end of the world! For a long time, I thought everyone else was dead or one of them, but now there's a whole VAN full of people who are still alive!"

Nami and Robin glanced at each other and stared back at Luffy as he idly dangled his arm off the side of the couch. Slowly, the truth behind Luffy's comments dawned on them. "You don't think... we're the only humans left on earth, do you?"

"Well, yeah obviously. Everyone else is dead. That's why no one's ever come to the city until you showed up. I mean if people were left, they'd definitely make their way to New York sometime, right? At least to check if anyone is here?"

"How... How long have you been by yourself, Luffy?" Nami asked as gently as she could.

"Uhhhh I dunnoooo... Let's see it was winter three... four times? So that's like a couple years. More than two."

Robin nodded. "You seem to be taking it well, at least."

"Ahahaha! Nah when I was left alone at first, I was a big wreck! I cried a lot and tried to find people but eventually I just figured out that there wasn't anyone left. But none of that matters anymore because you showed up and now we can all live together and I'll have people to talk to again!"

It was like a train wreck that Nami and Robin kept encouraging. They just felt compelled to harvest for more information and every answer they received just made them feel worse and worse.

It was the cheerful, nonchalant way he talked about things, casually mentioning that the last few remnants of New York basically abandoned him when they were split up. Which the girls took to mean that his former group had just left him for dead. How he had to discover the hard way how to set up traps, defenses, find ways to keep himself safe. He cheerfully told them about close calls, almost getting bit, almost falling through old floors, almost, almost, almost.

Both of them felt a knot form in their stomachs. Robin because she knew what that was like. Separated from anyone you care about, wandering without a reason to come home beyond survival. Nami felt it because she DIDN'T know what it was like. She had never been alone since Zombie Day.

Which is why she stood up stepped toward Robin. "Could you give us a second, Luffy? I need to ask Robin something."

"Just don't go too far, haha!"

Nami offered up a strained giggle and hastily pulled Robin into a corner, whispering as quietly and harshly as she could. "Okay. Listen, we need to-"

"Take Luffy with us, I know."

"I mean did you hear all that? He's like a little sad... puppy! We can't just be like 'Well have fun being alone forever! Bye!' We have to do something."

Robin crossed her arms, bringing her hand to her mouth to bite her thumbnail. "I would love to, but I don't think Smoker would like us bringing someone like him along."

Nami's eyebrow raised. "Well. Screw Smoker."

"I was hoping you would say something like that," Robin answered, nodding her head.

At that, Nami turned back toward Luffy. "Hey! Pack up everything you think you'd need for a trip. We've got some shit to show you."

Luffy sat up suddenly, springing to his feet. "Ow," he said, clutching his ribs. "What kind of shit?"

"How about damn near everything from here to Atlanta? You've missed out on a lot since Zombie Day."

"Wha- ARE YOU SERIOUS?! Ow," he dashed forward to grab Nami's wrists. He grinned from ear to ear, his eyes similarly wide with excitement. "ROAD TRIP?! YEAH I WANNA GO ON A ROAD TRIP! Ow. I'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO GO ON ONE!" He threw his arms around her, nearly taking her down with the force of his hug.

"G-great! Okay then go... go pack and maybe stop squeezing me this hard?" Nami asked as politely as a person who was rapidly losing oxygen could. Luffy broke the hug and scrambled toward the other end of the store, to the back room where he presumably kept more supplies.

"Okay! Right! I'll be right back, so don't go anywhere! Be right back!" he vanished behind the back room door and then a few seconds later, peeked his head out once again to confirm they were still there. Grinning, he disappeared and they heard the sound of shuffling and giggling.

"We should leave. Just walk out the door and wait outside, see what he does," Robin suggested. Nami whirled around.

"Robin! That is HORRIBLE!"

"It was just a joke, relax."

True to form, Smoker was not at all happy with this new idiot kid getting in the van. But of course there was nothing he could actually do about it. Whatever Robin wanted, Robin got, by virtue of being the Messiah. They needed each other. As Luffy bounced in his seat, looking around at everyone else in the van, Smoker kept silently reminding himself of that. Gripping the briefcase tighter, so tight he thought his fingers might break. They needed each other...


	4. Chapter 4

Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance

Chapter 4

Have you ever screwed up? Have you ever screwed up gratuitously? Have you ever screwed up in a way that caused other, unforeseen screwups to occur in a domino effect of madness?

Have you ever screwed up so hard you doomed the entire planet?

This is a chapter about one such screwup.

Due to a number of incidents, blocked off highways, zombie herds, raiders, etc, Nami had been forced to lead everyone on an alternate-alternate route, one that ended up taking them through Ohio. This displeased most everyone in the group, because no one is ever happy to be in Ohio.

It wasn't all bad, though. They had managed to find and clear out a motel off the side of the road and set it up as a temporary shelter. It wasn't exactly a paradise but finally having a bed and separate rooms did wonders for the group's stress levels.

It took some convincing to get Smoker to settle down for a few days, but he finally, begrudgingly relented. On what would end up being their last night at the motel, he was out scouting for supplies. Nami was inside what she claimed as her room, enjoying a well-earned cigarette. She had her mother to blame for that particular vice. "Don't smoke," Bellemere would tell her as she bought another pack. "What did I tell you about smoking?" she would ask when she caught Nami smoking behind the house. "How many times do I have to tell you not to smoke?" as she gave Nami a Zippo lighter for her birthday. "You shame me with your vices," as she looked over the tobacco plants the settlement was raising for trade.

Bellemere had been adamant about not smoking in bed, but Nami figured what's the worst that could happen? She'd always been careful about that kind of thing. Just as she was finishing her last drag on it, she heard a knock on her door.

"Namiiiiiii come out heeeeeere! I'm bored! The cultists are weird and Robin's asleep and I have nothing to dooooooo!" Luffy's pathetic whiny voice was enticing enough to draw her attention and she flicked the cigarette butt into a nearby empty trash bin. Talking with Luffy always proved interesting. The boy loved to talk about nothing and had the strangest theories about how the world worked before Zombie Day.

"You could always go to bed yourself, you know," she teased, walking down the hallway with him.

"That's boring, though. I'd rather stay up and do stuff! I barely ever slept when I was alone!"

"And that clearly had no ill effects on you…"

"Did you say something?"

She cleared her throat. "I said what do you think Atlanta's going to be like?"

They talked for a while, walking outside so they wouldn't disturb anyone. Circles around the parking lot, which also doubled as perimeter sweep just in case anything happened. It was their second lap that Luffy noticed something odd in the window. "Hey, did you leave a light on in your room?"

She looked toward the building. It was completely dark, devoid of working electricity for years now. Save for one brightly illuminated window. "No... I have my flashlight right here. So that... That has to be..."

The light flickered, and Nami and Luffy could see smoke coming from the window. "Oh."

As it turns out, the trash bin was not empty. Nami assumed it was, but it in fact did have a few sheets of old, dusty, flammable paper in it.

The duo stared dumbfounded at the fire until the reality of it set in. "We don't have any fire extinguishers."

"No we don't."

"Hokay, let's get in there and get everyone out then."

Smoker was having a nice night. The first quiet night he had in years at this point. Just a simple scav run on a nearby town to see what he could find. Some bullets, cans of food. Not a major haul, but he wasn't driving back empty-handed. For the first time in a long time, he was smiling.

That smile did not last. It vanished the second he saw the orange glow in the darkness, just up the road he was driving on.

The cultists, Nami, and Luffy were all standing aimlessly outside, watching the motel burn with their mouths hanging open in a stupor.

"What-?! Wh-?! HOW?!"

The cultists, Robin, everyone but Luffy raised their hands to wordlessly point to Nami. She stepped back defensively. "Wh-Hey don't sell me out so quick!"

"What did you do?!" Smoker shouted. When Nami didn't answer, he shouted again, louder this time.

She rubbed the back of her head. "Look okay maybe… Maybe I flicked a cigarette butt where I wasn't supposed to. It's unclear EXACTLY what happened-"

"The fire came from your room!" the cultists shouted simultaneously.

Smoker drew in a deep breath, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "Alright. I'm not going to lose my temper. We needed to move on anyway. Now. Where is the briefcase?"

Have you ever screwed up?

"The… the briefcase…" Nami muttered, stepping backward.

"Yes. The briefcase. The one that was in my room. The one that contained the very important documents pertaining to Robin's medical history."

Everyone but Robin suddenly found the ground to be very interesting. Robin scanned each and every one of them, feeling her heart start to pound in her chest.

"None of you grabbed it, then? None of you tried to grab it?" There was an awkward shaking of heads and Smoker stepped through the group. He stood in front of the inferno with his arms crossed in front of him.

"So that's it! That is it then!" his voice was cracked, straining to come out of his mouth. "Two years of my life wasted! Just like that!"

"I wouldn't say they were wasted... I mean we can still get to Atlanta," Nami muttered under her breath.

"OH! WE CAN, HUH? AND I'M SURE THE CDC CAN JUST! STRAP ROBIN INTO THEIR SUPER BIOSCANNER AND INSTANTLY GET ALL OF HER INFORMATION!"

"Ooh if they have that then let's do that!" Luffy said cheerfully. The stunned silence that came from everyone else told him Smoker was being sarcastic.

"I'm going home," Smoker said eventually. "I'm done with this. I'm out."

Robin tried to move in front of him. "Wait wait, you can't just leave now! We can still make this work!"

"Yeah! We can't give up!" Nami followed up. Robin was quick to shove her out of Smoker's line of sight.

"I agree with the major, actually..." One of the cultists spoke up, pulling down her hood. "I joined this group because I believed in the scriptures- Er, well I guess they're just documents now." She fumbled to pull her robe off, dropping it on the ground. "I'm going home with the major."

"Yeah, I'm out too," another cultist said, yanking off his robe. "Good try though, good try. Almost made it."

The rest all followed suit, each murmuring agreement that it was a good attempt and it was fun while it lasted. One of them, an older woman, patted Robin on the shoulder as she walked past. "The important thing is that you tried, dearie."

The cultists, or rather the former cultists, talked idly amongst themselves as they headed toward the parked vans. Smoker was among them, and while he wasn't talking, he walked as though a tremendous weight had been lifted off his shoulders. One of them said, loudly and cheerfully, "At the very least, it's none of our faults!"

"That's right! Not a single one of us are to blame! It's all entirely Nami's fault that we failed!"

Nami sank to her knees and then fell to her side. She laid on the ground in a state only those who know true absolute failure can relate to.

"Now come on!" she heard Luffy call out. She watched him carefully step over her so he could go after the ex-cultists. "Just because Nami screwed up one time, you're just gonna leave her behind?! What kind of friends are you?! After everything that's happened in the world, isn't it important to stick together?! That's what friends do! No matter what happens, they stand by each other! They support each other!" He crossed his arms in front of himself, standing tall and proud. "All of you should be ashamed of yourselves, trying to ditch her! Now no matter what happens, we need to get to Atlanta! Robin is still counting on us!"

The crowd was silent, stunned even. They clearly had never been talked to like that, by a 20 year old especially, and as they looked amongst themselves, some of them showed hints of shame.

"Well… That's all nice and everything, but… None of us were really Nami's friend," one of them said, scratching behind his head.

"What."

"I mean she was alright… Sometimes… But none of us would really call her a friend," and with that came murmured agreeing and the occasional nodding head.

Smoker turned around to look at Luffy, to make sure he understood this. "The truth is, Nami was just our navigator. And we don't need one of those to go home. Come on, Robin. We're out of here."

Robin drew in a breath, her arms crossed and fingernails digging into the skin on her arm. "I'm not going. I'm headed to Atlanta, no matter what."

Smoker shrugged. "Suit yourself. The rest of us are going back. Hopefully I'll see you alive one day," and with that he turned around and marched for the van. The others followed after him, saying awkward muttered goodbyes to Robin.

"WELL! SCREW YOU GUYS!" Luffy shouted as they walked away. "YOU ALL SUCK, SURPRISING NO ONE!"

"Whatever! Later!" one of them called out, waving with their back turned to him.

That left just Luffy, Nami, and Robin with their backs to the slowly dying inferno. Nami managed to lift herself to her feet, brushing dirt off of her clothes. "Thanks, Robin… I know I screwed up, but… I'm glad you're still willing to trust me." She held her arms out, offering a hug.

Robin shoved her away. "Don't get the wrong idea. I'm absolutely FURIOUS at you right now. But you are my only chance at getting to Atlanta, so I have to tolerate you for now."

Nami's shoulders slumped. "Oh."

"Trust me, if I had any other means of getting to Atlanta, I would take it-"

"Okay okay I get it!"

Luffy approached Nami from behind, putting his hand on her shoulder. "Well I still like you, Nami."

"See?" she said dejectedly. "Luffy still likes me…" she leaned against him for support.

"If that's what you need to keep going, more power too you, I guess," Robin huffed. "Damn it, look I'm trying hard to be civil here but you have to understand, this," she held up her arm and pulled down her sleeve, "this is all I have. I'm not particularly skilled at survival. I'm not physically strong or a good hunter. I'm intelligent, but not in a lot of immediately useful ways. I'm only good because of this stupid bite."

"Aw come on, that's not true!" Luffy said.

Nami nodded in agreement. "You're not some deadbeat or anything! You've survived all this time, that's not nothing!"

Robin shook her head and pulled her sleeve back down. "No, that's just it. I've only survived because of this thing. I was bitten when my old group was attacked and I guess… the zombies didn't like it. So they left me alone while they tore apart the others. I didn't survive because I escaped or because I was strong enough to fight back. I survived because they didn't want me." She turned her back on the two of them, from the motel. Smoker and company had been merciful enough to leave them with one van at least.

Nami pulled away from Luffy to walk to Robin. "Hey I'm probably not the person you want to hear this from right now, but I'm pretty much willing to do anything to make this up to you. Anything to make you feel better. I mean, we've still got a world to save, right?"

Robin slowly turned around, her eyes going red from holding back tears.

Nami shrugged, stammering out words. "I-I mean you can do whatever! Like, if you want to punch me or something, you totally-"

She was cut off by the full force of a 31 year old woman's knuckles making contact with her ear. "AAAAGGGHH!" She staggered back, Luffy reaching out to help steady her and keep her from falling to the ground.

"MY EAR?! MY FFF- MY FREAKING EAR?! WHAT THE HELL?!"

"Are you okay?!" Luffy asked over Nami's pained groaning.

"No I'm not freaking okay, she just punched me in the EAR!"

Robin let out a content sigh, standing up straighter and letting a slight smile curl across her lips. "Ahh, I do feel much better now. Thank you, Nami. When you two are ready, I'll be in the van." She nodded pleasantly at them and Nami couldn't tell if Robin was making fun of her or not. She stood there in the parking lot with one hand on her ear, Luffy holding her up by her shoulders.

"Rrrgh… Okay. Okay. Shit, that effing hurts…

"You good?"

"I'm good."

Even so, he helped her walk to the car. She didn't actually need the assistance, but she wanted to milk the human contact for all its worth. Robin was in the front passenger seat, waiting for Nami to take the wheel.

Nami stopped in front of the door, giving the van a quick once-over. "Aw dammit, did they..? They did. Damn it, Kaya's going to be upset when she finds out we lost her van."


	5. Chapter 5

Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance

Chapter 5

"I have no idea who started it and when, but word about it came to us and it just spread everywhere," Nami was explaining to Luffy. She was in the passenger seat, turned around so she could look at him while he was sprawled in the entire backseat. "A lot of people say it's a way to provide levity in a bad situation or it's a way to distance oneself from the horrors of the world. I just think it's fun to use as bragging rights."

It had been several days since the incident in Ohio, the three of them had passed the Georgia state border some time ago, and Robin insisted on being at the wheel. She wanted to be the one to take them into Atlanta.

"There's only a few rules," Nami continued. "Normal zombies are worth one point. Zombies in uniform are worth ten. That's like cops, firemen, doctors…"

"Soldiers, mailmen… Clowns…" Robin added.

"Clowns don't count, they're normal."

"I'm pretty sure clowns count. They count in Canada."

Nami rolled her eyes. "Well we're not in Canada, so while you're in America, you use the American score system."

"That's idiotic, I might as well have two scores if we're going by that."

"Then just make sure you remind everyone you're using Canadian points when you tell people your score!"

Luffy stared dumbounded. "Wait wait wait so am I using two scores…? I don't get it…"

Nami quickly waved her hand dismissively. "Don't worry about her. Just people in uniform are worth 10. And celebrities are worth 50. That's it. That's how you calculate your score. You wouldn't happen to know how many zombies you've killed, would you?"

He kicked his feet in thought, staring at the ceiling of the car. "Aaaahhh uhh… Nah I dunno. There's way too many to count. But I'll try keeping track now! That sounds like fun!"

Nami nodded, laughing along with Luffy. "Yeah it is pretty fun. Bragging rights are always nice."

"I'm gonna end up with the highest score out of anyone! I'll be the best zombie killer in the entire world!"

Nami thought vaguely of their first meeting, of Luffy laughing his ass off while he destroyed a zombie's skull. "Well, that's a good goal to have but let's not focus on that, alright?"

"Oh damn..." Robin suddenly muttered. Nami turned back to face front and Luffy sat up to see what she was looking at. The highway leading into the city was progressively becoming more and more blocked with cars. To the point that made continuing in the van impossible.

Every lane was blocked with an enormous line of cars leading directly into the city. "Well we could turn around, try to find another way in..." Nami offered, already reaching for the maps in the glove compartment.

Robin let out a sigh. "The city is right there. There it is. Atlanta."

"I know! But we can't drive in with all these cars around!" Nami said somewhat defensively. She had gotten used to acting that way lately.

"I'm not blaming you, I'm just saying. It's right in front of us and we can't get in."

Luffy leaned in. "We could walk it!"

"Walk it? Through the middle of the city? Unprotected?" Nami asked.

Luffy shrugged. "Yeah, why not? I did it all the time in New York!"

The girls looked to each other and back to Luffy. They both hadn't considered that. Thus far, Luffy's survival skills hadn't been necessarily crucial. "You think you can lead us through the city?" Nami asked him. He nodded eagerly. He was already climbing out of the car, bouncing on his heels and grinning at them through the window.

Sometimes bad ideas sound good just because there are no immediate alternatives. Oh sure if Nami or Robin thought about it, they could have eventually come up with something better. But Luffy was already ready to go. Life lesson, kids. If you want to do something with a group, start doing it. The confines of social etiquette will force the others to go along with you. Even in the wake of a zombie apocalypse.

This is why Robin and Nami found themselves outside of their van, following Luffy down the highway, weaving their way through long-abandoned cars. Most of them were empty, or carrying supplies to meager to even bother picking up.

From the back, Nami flipped through some of her maps. She called out to the others. "So the bad news is I don't know exactly WHERE the CDC building is, but I know we can at least use the maps to mark where we've been and if we just find a big building with a sign that says Center for Disease-" a sudden thudding noise made her jump with a yelp and she whirled around toward the source. A zombie, trapped inside a car next to her for who knows how long, had smacked its head against the window in an attempt to get at her. "Ah jeeze-!" she stammered, stepping backwards away from it.

"Nami!" Luffy called out, he and Robin backtracking to her.

"I'm fine! Just- This asshole here got me a little." She pointed to the car.

Luffy followed her finger with his eyes and shrugged. "I can get him for you!" He bent down to pick up a rock to break the window open when Nami grabbed him by the shoulder.

"Totally not necessary. But I appreciate the sentiment."

The trio rearranged themselves to put Nami in the middle with Robin and Luffy in front and back respectively. Allowing her to look through her map of Atlanta more freely. While Luffy pretended to be a secret agent, pointing his pistol at random targets and humming theme music to himself, Robin leaned back to talk quietly with Nami.

"You're usually so tough, it's not like you to get scared like that."

"Ah, I just… I don't like the rush hour zombies, you know? They're harmless but it's the implication. Stuck in that car while you bleed out or whatever? That's just scary to me."

Robin shrugged but in a totally understanding way. "That's fair. I would go so far as to say every method of dying is scary but I can see your point. As a side note, I think it's adorable that you have a little nickname for everything."

They all quieted themselves when they moved further into the city. Atlanta was not like New York, nearly empty save for a few wandering zombies. The infection was much more present. The walking dead shambled dumbly through the streets, bumping into each other and clawing at what they thought was some kind of threat and/or food.

"Let's keep this quiet," Robin whispered. "If we don't make too much noise, we'll be able to move past them. They don't care about me so if we stick close they won't pay much attention to you two. Used to travel like that when I was a messiah. Don't draw attention, only fight if you have to…"

Nami made a point of grabbing Luffy's shoulder. She repeated what Robin said, making sure it got through to him. He pouted at her. "I know I know! I've been doing this for years, remember?!"

"But this time you have precious cargo," Nami said, pointing to herself and Robin. "So let's just be as safe as we possibly can, savvy?"

Luffy pouted at her, but took his position covering their rear, occasionally glancing over his shoulder to make sure he was still following them. Situations like this, all it can take is one little mistake for everything to go wrong. One slight lapse in judgment, the slightest bit of weakness.

Which is exactly what happened. With the girls focused on either the map or making sure the street ahead was clear enough to move, neither of them saw Luffy break away for a second, having seen something shiny in the hands of a zombie slumped against a wall with its brains hanging out.

It was a good old fashioned aluminum baseball bat. The ideal kind of weapon a kid like him needed. He just broke formation for a second. Didn't even feel a need to tell them, he wouldn't be far away. He crouched down to pick it up, admiring it in his hands. Lightweight but sturdy. A classic weapon against the ever looming dead.

Feeling rather proud of himself for such a great find, he stood up to announce it, but as he turned around, found there were no girls in sight. Well, no living ones. There was a few zombie women off across the street there.

Crap.

He was near an intersection so he figured they must have turned the corner. Making a dash to catch up, he stopped at the nonfunctional crosswalk and looked left and right for the girls. They weren't in sight.

Double crap.

He thought about shouting for them, seeing as they couldn't have gotten too far. But by the time he opened his mouth, he felt cold, clammy hands on his shoulders. Then a sudden weight on his back, and a nose full of the smell of rotting flesh. He dropped the bat, reached behind himself, grabbing the zombie by the head and effortlessly throwing it over his shoulders. A quick stomp to the skull smashed it open and also splattered his sandal and foot with brains. Two seconds after being separated and he was already drawing attention.

Triple crap.

So making noise was out of the question. He'd have to find them the hard way. Manually. Using his eyeballs instead of using his mouth. He picked up the bat and used it to nudge the body at his feet. "One," he said under his breath.

He slung the bat over his shoulder, stood in the center of the intersection, and picked via eeny-meeny-miney-moe which path he seemed most likely to find them. He decided he would do this for every intersection he came across, as it made the most sense to him. The first random pick took him right and as he crossed the street, he calmly swung the bat into the skull of a zombie attempting to lunge at him.

WHACK. "Two."

His heart was beating a little faster than normal. WHACK. "Three." He scanned the streets with every step, hoping he'd see the girls. Hoping they were alright. It had been a long time since Luffy had anyone to worry about. He had long ago given up on worrying about himself. Not because of any self-loathing, but because he was confident that nothing bad could ever happen to him.

WHACK. "Four. This is a really cool game!"

But really, serious face, he was worried about Nami. And Robin. But when he thought- WHACK. "Five!" -When he thought about "the girls", Nami was the first face that came to his mind. Which he was sure meant something- WHACK. "Six!" _He was sure it meant something._ He just didn't know- WHACK. "Seven! I'm getting really good at this. I should write my number down so I don't forget." … He just didn't know what.

WHACK. "Eight-" he paused for a second and then brought the bat downward onto the zombie's head, ending its twitching for sure. "Eight."

It was past noon at this point. What time exactly, he had no idea. He did know it was going to be dark in a few hours, which would severely hamper his searching abilities. Seeing as, despite his best efforts, he had been unable to train himself to see in the dark by studying the flying patterns of bats.

The tension in his chest started to rise. His heart rate accelerated and he gripped the bat tighter. Being alone, outside, and in the dark was a bad spot to be in. His teeth gritted, he spat out "Nine," as he bashed another one in the head. If he didn't find them by tonight, he wasn't sure he'd be able to ever find them.

"They've gotta be somewhere... They wouldn't leave me behind." He wasn't saying that to reassure himself. He was already positive they were searching for him too. He was just reiterating what he knew to be true. A reminder for himself.

Rounding a corner, he found himself face to face with quite a cluster of zombies, far too many to even bother trying to move through. He quickly decided to double back and try a different route when it occurred to him that he hadn't been paying attention at all to where he was walking. He had spent all this time thinking he was in New York. The buildings weren't the same, of course, but they were close enough that his mindset switched and he completely forgot he was in a different city. A different city that he was now lost in.

"Great, why'd they have to make all the cities look different? It'd be way easier if everything was the same!" Once Robin cured the world, he would seriously talk to the people in charge when they were all rebuilding.

He wasn't any closer to finding Nami and Robin either. He tried his hardest to ignore the cluster that was now following him. A brisk walking pace was his best defense right now. For all he knew, they were dead. "No, they're not dead. They're tough. Nami's strong and cool and Robin's immune. They aren't gonna die. I'll find them."

But the possibility was there. And as he moved down different streets, adding to his score along the way, he gritted his teeth tighter. Gripped the bat so tightly his knuckles went white. Every zombie that lunged for him just seemed annoying, to the point where he didn't even bother trying to take them down anymore. One more thing getting in the way of finding his friends, who were ABSOLUTELY ALIVE AND OKAY.

He had never had trouble convincing himself of anything until now.

The ever-growing frustration manifested in the form of him quickening his pace to a jog. He still had no idea where he was going, but at least now he'd get there faster. The sun was starting to set at this point, and he fumbled for the flashlight in his pocket. There was still enough light to see, but barely. He wasn't looking at buildings or street signs or any landmarks, he was focused entirely on finding bright orange hair.

However, what did manage to catch his attention was not a particular building, but a sudden lack of building. As in, a building that should be there, but wasn't. He had run out into a large parking lot, full of past remains of a military blockade that had clearly fallen. Concrete barriers, open tents, the pavement littered here and there with devoured corpses and zombies. But there was no building attached to the parking lot. Instead there was an enormous pile of charred rubble and ash.

This caught his eye because it was the only building that appeared to have been bombed. Everything else was mostly intact, save for normal wear and tear.

There was a sign near the front of the parking lot. Taller than he was, in white and blue. Made of concrete and steel, the kind of thing you'd see in front of a hospital or some other government institution.

In big, clear letters, it read "CDC". Which Luffy thought was interesting. CDC was the name of the place Robin and Nami wanted to get to. So here was a sign that said CDC and they were looking for a place called the CDC. And yet, the only thing here was a crater-

"Oh."

Several hours earlier.

"Luffy I'm going to turn around and I'm going to see you moaning out of boredom and I'm not going to see a zombie," Nami whispered, folding her map and holding it in her left hand as she slowly turned her head to see a zombie that was absolutely not Luffy right behind her.

She jumped back in surprise, and quickly raised her switchblade, forcing it into the zombie's temple. It choked out one last breath before falling limp to its side.

"Robin, we have a problem."

Robin turned around to see Nami gesturing at the space their young man should be in. "Oh dear."

"He probably saw something shiny. Come on, let's backtrack until we find him."

For the clarification of us outside viewers, it had literally been less than a minute since Luffy had separated himself from the girls. Not that they knew that, of course. But that was all it took for him to vanish. They retraced their steps and found themselves where he once was. The only clue he had been there was a freshly killed zombie and a trail of bloody sandal footprints leading down the exact opposite street they had been going down.

"Good Lord, he's gotten himself lost," Nami groaned. "We've gotta go find him before something bad happens." She followed after the trail of footprints, Robin silently keeping in step with her.

Nami was the one doing most of the talking. She didn't even seem to be aware she was doing it. "This is just like him too. I should've known this would happen. We need to keep a leash on that idiot."

Robin said nothing.

"I guarantee he saw something shiny or dumb like a comic book and that just took higher priority," the footprints ended, but another corpse nearby told them they were going in the right direction. "Good thing he left us a trail of breadcrumbs."

Caved in skulls, leading down the streets in random directions, blood, bits of skull and brain between them. It wasn't likely he was doing it on purpose but it certainly benefitted them. "Do you think he's doing this barehanded? I don't think he grabbed a weapon when we left the van. Because if he's punching these things to death, that's badass as hell."

Another couple of corpses lay ahead, each with their heads smashed in. "I probably shouldn't be so hard on him, you know? He's probably worried about us, or stressed out because he's alone again. He hates that, y'know?"

Again, Robin remained quiet.

As they followed the trail and Nami vented more frustrations about her unreliable companion, the number of immobile corpses decreased and the number of active corpses increased. "Tell me he didn't wander through there…" Nami moaned as they rounded the corner to see a thick pack clustered throughout the street. They quickly doubled back around the corner and sank against the wall. "How the hell are we supposed to get through that?!"

"How did Luffy get through that?" was Robin's response.

"The hell you mean?"

Robin shrugged. "I'm just wondering, you're more worried about how he's coping with being alone than… Whether or not he's alive. You don't think he's invincible, do you?"

An awkward laugh strained it way past Nami's mouth. "Oh come on Robin, get real. He's Luffy. He's not the kind of guy who just… goes down from a zombie bite in the middle of a city. That's not how things work."

"That's exactly how things work. That's the world we live in, people don't get spectacular deaths anymore. They go down because of dumb mistakes. Or because they went off alone."

"Well… Okay yeah but he's survived on his own this whole time already! He knows what he's doing!" She didn't sound so sure of herself, so she repeated it with more confidence. "He knows what he's doing. Above everything else, that guy knows how to survive."

Robin shook her head. "I'm just wondering if it's even worth it to look for him. The odds are high that he's one of them now, and I don't know if I'm prepared to actually see that. And I know you certainly aren't."

Nami flashed her a dirty look. "What do you mean by that? You saying I'm weak?! I've seen friends turn, I know what that's like! And besides I'm not ready to just write him off as dead! I can't believe you."

"Fine, fine, maybe I've been misjudging you!" Robin said defensively.

Nami sighed, leaning back over the wall to make sure the horde wasn't coming after them. "Either way… We're the ones who dragged Luffy out of New York, we told him he could travel with us. In a way he's kind of our responsibility. If he's alive and out there, we have to find him. And…" she swallowed hard. "If he's gone, then I'd wanna put him to rest."

Nami felt Robin's hand on her shoulder, gently pulling her away from the corner. She was smiling when Nami turned to face her. "That was a test and you passed."

This earned Robin a punch in the arm. "Stop with the test bullshit you dick."

Both of them silently agreed that they weren't going to brave trying to push through the horde. That would be stupid. A quick look at the map allowed them to plot a course that would take them around and hopefully set them back on the right path. They could only hope he was adamant about increasing his score, as it was currently the only way they had a chance to track him.

Now they didn't know it but you and I know that up until this point they had been following Luffy's trail pretty well. Neither party knew it but they were only a matter of minutes apart from each other, one of those situations where they JUST keep missing each other. However, at this point, Nami and Robin had started going in a completely opposite direction with the vain hope that their paths would reconvene.

In order to keep track of events, I will tell you now that we are rejoining Nami and Robin roughly a half hour after we had left Luffy.

Out in the dark is a poor place to be when there are zombies outside, if that wasn't too obvious. On the positive side, the dead weren't attracted to sources of light, so they weren't concerned bringing out their flashlights. On the negative side, it would make their search for Luffy all the more difficult.

As much as she hated it, Nami had even started pointing her light into the faces of the zombies, making sure none of them were him. Feeling a twinge of guilt or shame or some horrible mixed feeling she didn't like. Robin could feel her frustration, practically radiating off of her.

Just as she was about to scream, hope rang out like a gunshot. That's not a metaphor. They had heard someone fire a gun off in the distance. Firing a gun meant someone was alive. And that someone might just be Luffy.

Of course, sound just provided a general area, but it was still a direction they could head in. And if luck was on their side, they would keep hearing gunshots. Nami stayed uncomfortably close to Robin in order to mask herself from the undead. And not uncomfortable in the sense that it was awkward for the two of them to be so physically close, because they were both mature adults who weren't fazed by things like that. It was uncomfortable because they kept tripping over each other's feet and couldn't move too fast.

Another gunshot rang out, giving them a better idea where the source was and they broke out into the best sprint they could manage. They darted around zombies, waiting for another gunshot to lead them on. Two more shots rang out, leading them to round a corner and see, off in the distance, the beam of a flashlight bouncing idly up and down.

"LUFFY-!" Nami called out before Robin threw an arm over her mouth.

"Ssh! We don't know if that's-"

"NAMIIII!" came Luffy's voice in the distance.

"I told you. I TOLD you," Nami grinned as smugly as humanly possible. Robin good-naturedly rolled her eyes and allowed Nami to lead the way. As they got closer, they could see he was actually sitting on top of the sign he had found. A handful of zombies were lunging for him, a few of them were dead on the ground with bullet holes in their heads. The girls easily disposed of whatever was left and helped Luffy down.

In an instant, his arms were around Nami, holding her tight, he even leaned on her a little. He didn't say anything for a while, just hugged her as close as he physically could.

He didn't let up when he started talking. "Thanks guys! I ran outta ammo and I couldn't reach 'em with the bat I found so… I was kinda screwed!"

"Glad to be of service, dear," Nami mumbled, not hugging him back but not necessarily pushing him away either.

Looking past Nami's shoulder, Luffy called out to Robin, his eyes wide with concern. "Oh! Robin! Robin, you're not gonna believe this! And you probably won't like it either, but… I found it! I found the place, the CDC! We're here!"

Robin dropped her flashlight in surprise. She scrambled to pick it back up and pointed it at the sign Luffy was sitting on. Center for Disease Control, written right on it. "O-oh my God… Oh my God… He found it through sheer dumb luck…" she gently placed her hand on the sign, feeling it, confirming it was real.

Nami had to lean a bit to see over Luffy's shoulder, to watch Robin take it all in. "That is an amazing and highly unlikely coincidence. But… Luffy… Why wouldn't she like it?"

At this, Luffy pulled away slowly. Pointing his flashlight where the building SHOULD be. "Well… we're here."

Robin's eyes followed the beam to the rubble it was pointing at. Nami followed it as well and when she processed what exactly she was looking at, her head snapped to Robin. Part concern, part morbid curiosity at what her reaction would be.

She didn't say a word, just let her mouth hang open, arms falling limp at her sides. She shook her head in disbelief and stood there, letting her flashlight fall from her hands. She was as still as a statue.

"Robin…?"

"Are you in there…?" Luffy waved his hand in front of her eyes. Nothing. Not even a blink.

The conscious pair gave quick, nervous glances around the area. Nothing seemed to be coming for them, so they were free to focus on Robin. Luffy tried giving her a gentle shake, but she remained still. Unfortunately, they did not have the luxury of standing around in shock through the night. They each grabbed one of her wrists and tried to pull her away from the parking lot. "We uh… We have to find somewhere safe," Nami said.

It was like everything in Robin started up at the same time. She yanked away from the two of them, "Why?! What's the point?! It's over!" She ran her hands through her hair and gestured to the wreckage. "This was it! This was the only hope we had left! The only hope I had left! And it's… It's gone!"

She slowly sank to her knees, letting out an agonized sob. "It's all gone… What's the point of living anymore?"

"Whoa, whoa, don't say that!" Nami slid next to her, putting her hands on Robin's shoulders. "D-don't think like that! You can't just give up on life! You… Luffy!" She suddenly snapped to look up at him. "You're good at being uplifting! Say something!"

He didn't get a chance to let forth a stream of simple heartwarming wisdom, though. Beams of light like spotlights suddenly shone on the three of them and as they squinted into the source, they could see a handful of men pointing assault rifles at them.

One of them wasn't armed, and he's the one that stepped forward. With the light, they could see he was wearing a clean suit, necktie, and his hair was slicked back and clean. This was helpful to them because it identified him as a total douchebag. The second thing that stood out was his missing left hand, his arm ending just at the wrist. "Well I'll be God damned. We heard the shots and came to investigate. Never thought you'd be the one causing all that commotion."

Luffy and Nami didn't recognize him at all, but Robin's eyes widened in surprise. She recognized that voice. She stumbled to her feet, not taking her eyes off of the approaching figure. "No… No, that's impossible! I was pretty sure you were dead!"


	6. Chapter 6

Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance

Chapter 6

The one handed man was named Crocodile. But he preferred to be called Sir Crocodile, which was more proof that he was just a douchebag. All Luffy and Nami had been able to pry out of Robin was that this guy was her ex-husband and she really did not want to talk more about it.

But he wanted to talk.

Oh goodness gracious did he want to talk.

Crocodile ran an apartment building full of survivors, you see. He was their leader, the one all of them relied on and depended on for their lifestyles. This is what he told them, at least, as he led them up the stairs to the top floor where his apartment was. He got the top floor apartment because he was in charge, that was his right as the leader to be at the literal head of the building. Long story short, he was a very important man with a lot of big important duties, and that made him the best.

Robin was used to it, but the younger two weren't. He reeked of sleaze. Like a used car salesman and an 80's movie business villain rolled into one person. She was sure that out of anyone to survive Zombie Day, he wouldn't have been one. He would've pissed off whatever group he found himself with and they would've cut him off. It was just her luck that he'd find a group that would not only keep him around, they'd make him their damn leader.

He had brought the trio into the comfort and privacy of his own apartment. They were seated on a couch and he in a Lay-Z Boy, sipping whiskey from a glass, grinning far too wide for a regular human being. A record player was running, providing ambient background music, candles were lit to provide some warm lighting, and they could see all the beautiful works of art on display, paintings hanging on his walls, statues depicting abstract figures.

Just a total, total douchebag.

"But enough about me!" he said to them when he had finally finished his history of the apartment. "Tell me more about you three! Robin, dear, what were you doing there at the CDC?"

"Can we not," she said. Not asked, said. Asking requires a hint of emotional input and she was not up for that at the moment.

"No, no, please! Do tell! I want to hear what brings you all the way to Atlanta! That's a long way from Montreal!"

"I would really rather not," she insisted as flatly as possible.

"What… happened to the CDC? Nami broke the awkwardness. "Robin told us they were in touch like a year ago!"

Crocodile pulled the recline lever so he could lean back and look at the ceiling. "Ohhhh thaaat. Yes, quite the tragedy. I'm not sure what happened exactly, just one day the entire facility went up from the inside. Some kind of… failsafe emergency trigger? To prevent some kind of horrible disease from getting out."

"But that already happened, that's why there's zombies everywhere," Luffy said.

Crocodile stared at him for a second. "Yes. Very good, son."

"So this whole trip was for nothing..." Robin mumbled under her breath. "All for nothing..."

Crocodile pressed his finger and thumb between his eyes. "Alright if she's not going to talk, could one of you two at least explain what you're doing here?"

"You brought us here," Luffy offered.

Nami couldn't tell if he was intentionally being difficult or if he genuinely meant that as his explanation, and she decided they were equally funny.

"I meant," Crocodile started, pausing only to down the entirety of his glass. "How did you get from.. wherever you're from, to Atlanta."

Luffy nodded slowly, "Ohhhhhh I getcha now. That's a long story, though…" both he and Nami glanced to Robin, looking for confirmation that it was okay for them to talk. Robin didn't do anything besides sigh.

So the two of them went into a lengthy explanation. The kind of lengthy explanation that an amateur writer would write out in word-for-word dialogue between the three of them in an effort to inflate their word count. They even summarized the secret bonus chapter that I'm sure you found by now.

"So after Robin went kind of blank, you found us and you took us to this apartment and brought us up here and started asking us questions," Luffy said, concluding the story.

Nami leaned back on the couch. "So y'know you can see why she's basically catatonic right now."

"Yes, I would be too… What a senseless waste of an opportunity. All that profit, wasted…" Crocodile mused.

"Profit?" asked Nami.

He flashed that grin again, his eyes widening with delight. "Of course! People would pay tons for a chance at a cure! Why, when the dust had finally settled and order had been restored, whoever was selling the cure would be the richest man in the world! I could've ruled the entire country with that kind of power!"

Luffy and Nami stared dumbfounded at him, but Robin just groaned, familiar with this kind of behavior.

"That… That is one of the most horrible things I've ever heard," Luffy said.

"Yeah I like money as much as the next girl but like, come on."

Crocodile shrugged, still grinning. "Well we all see opportunities differently I suppose. Now why don't we get the three of you situated in a room?"

"Oh, we're not staying or anything," Nami said as Crocodile stood up and walked to the door. "We've gotta get back on the road, actually…"

Crocodile was silent for a second. "Oh but I insist you stay!" he said in a voice that was so nice that the underlying threat behind it would have been lost on most anyone. And in fact was lost on Luffy. Fortunately Nami was able to pick up on it and stop her friend from saying anything else.

"If you insist…"

Crocodile personally escorted them down a few floors to an empty apartment, which, to his credit, was a nicer place than Luffy or Nami could have ever afforded had there not been a zombie apocalypse. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, a fairly decent kitchen and sitting area. The furniture was already in place, as someone had clearly been living here before. It had been kept clean and all the decorations had been cleared out, but the essentials of comfort were all there.

Robin could have probably afforded it, though. She was smart.

"The three of you can take the time to settle in, we'll have you up and running as productive members of society in no time! Now, if you have any problems at all, then please address them to someone who isn't me, because I don't take complaints directly."

Proving his point, he left the apartment and shut the door behind him before any of the trio could say anything.

"We're not… Really staying here, are we?" Luffy said to Nami.

She shook her head. "No of course not, we're getting out of here at our earliest convenience. Which is tomorrow, since we've all kind of had a rough night. Especially you, Robin-" she turned to face Robin, but the woman was already gone, making her way to the couch in the apartment to collapse onto it.

The two of them exchanged concerned glances. "Robin? Are you okay?" Luffy asked.

"I'm really not."

Hesitant to press the issue any further, Nami asked "Do you want… us to sit out here with you…?"

Robin's hand raised in a dismissive wave. "No I'll just lay out here… Maybe if I'm lucky I won't wake up tomorrow morning…"

Luffy really didn't want her to keep saying stuff like that but he bit his tongue for the time being. Mostly because Nami grabbed his shoulder when she saw his mouth start to open. "Listen sweetie, she's in a rough spot right now, so let's just let her cool off and we can try to work this out tomorrow, eh?"

So instead they both offered up an awkward "Goodnight, Robin", to which she waved and mumbled something into the pillow that sounded like a response.

Letting her be for now, the duo found themselves with another predicament. Crocodile had told them this was a two bedroom apartment. That was only technically true, which is the most inconvenient kind of true.

There were two bedrooms, but only one bed between them. The other room had been, before Zombie Day, apparently been used as a study. There was a desk, a chair, a lamp, some minor exercise equipment (which Luffy did appreciate), but nothing that would provide any comfort to sleep on.

Maybe the desk if you were desperate.

Moving on to the other room, they had hoped vainly they would find twin beds inside. There were not. Just one of fairly decent size. There was also a dresser, useless as all their extra clothes were still in the van outside the city.

"So… What do we do here?" Nami asked, the two of them in front of the only bed. "What's protocol?"

Luffy shrugged. "I dunno. I guess we can share it?"

She was somewhat taken aback. Rock Paper Scissors, coin flip, higher score, she had thought any number of ways to decide who gets the bed. Sharing it had occurred to her, but she didn't think it would occur to him. At least, not so quickly.

"You're okay with that?" She asked.

He nodded, shrugging again in his uniquely casual way. "Yeah, we sleep in that van together all the time. How is sharing a room different?"

She couldn't argue with that, and yet there was still a looming uncomfortableness between the two of them. Divided evenly between being in a strange new place, a possibly dangerous supervisor, Robin's emotional state, and the faux-intimacy that always came with sharing a bed for the first time.

"What're we gonna do about her anyway?" Luffy whispered as they both lay awake.

"Not sure. Just keep an eye on her for now I guess?"

He stirred, uncomfortable. "We need to come up with something to say to her."

Nami turned over, trying to signal that she wanted to sleep instead of talk. "I have no idea what to say. Not a lot of psychology books cover losing your status as savior of the world."

Luffy had more on his mind that he wanted to express, but exhaustion was starting to cloud his thoughts more than they usually were. Glancing over at Nami's back, he decided to put it off until the morning.

Ever since Zombie Day, one of the most common afflictions suffered by the population at large was the complete absence of a good night's sleep. If you weren't in a safe place, you slept lightly out of fear of being attacked or robbed or bitten. If you were in a safe place, you still ironically slept poorly out of the paranoia that what you perceive as safe actually wasn't. The lingering fear that sleeping in a warm, soft bed in a secure room will make you lower your guard and you'll end up paying for it. There was just no winning.

This is why the light tapping at the apartment door jolted all three of them awake with a snap. Luffy and Nami shot up and hastily scanned the room for A) a weapon, and B) a potential attacker. Even Robin, still crashed on the couch, forced herself to roll off and leap to her feet in one quick movement.

There was another polite knock at the door, the patient, slightly muffled knocking of someone who feels that they might be bothering whoever's door they're knocking on, but still feels the need to get their attention anyway.

Nami and Luffy, upon realizing that they weren't under attack, both dropped back down onto the bed with a groan. "What time is it…?" Nami asked, despite none of the trio owning a wristwatch or clock.

Sleepily, Luffy looked around the room, as though he'd find a calendar. His brain eventually reminded him that calendars keep track of dates, not the time of day. "It's… Sun is Out O'clock."

Robin, feeling a headache so intense she was sure her skull had cracked open, stumbled to the door and opened it slowly. Standing in the hallway, holding a tray of mugs, were a pair of teenagers. One girl, one boy, each wearing a warm, friendly smile. Robin had thought there was something off about their expressions, they were far too energetic, far too endearing to be real. Who the hell was this happy these days?

"Hi! I hope we're not waking you up or anything! We're your neighbors across the hall, we just wanted to bring you some coffee!"

This was exactly the kind of behavior Robin had come to expect from someone under Crocodile's control. The false generosity, offering comforting things like a free room with no strings attached, luxuries like hot coffee served in an actual clean mug. It was the thing people like Crocodile did to not only brag about the quality of their lives, but also their way of enticing poor, desperate survivors to stay within their community.

Robin didn't buy into the bullshit, and she didn't take the coffee. The welcoming committee stood awkwardly in the doorway, waiting for her to say something. "We… put sugar in this one, if that's… how you take it?" the girl offered, tilting her head toward one of the mugs.

"Thanks, but we're good-" Robin started to say before a voice from behind cut her off.

"Holy shit is that coffee?! You guys have coffee here?!" Nami cried out, emerging from the hallway with Luffy close behind. "I don't suppose you guys have tangerines, do you?"

The greeters frowned. "No, I'm sorry… We've got a garden on the roof, but we can't really grow everything…"

Nami waved a dismissive hand. "It's all good."

"Does Crocodile send cheery greeters to everyone their first morning?" Robin asked, turning her attention on the teenagers.

Clearly sensing the hostility, the boy raised his hands defensively. "Oh! No, Crocodile didn't send us or anything! We heard you moving in last night. That apartment's been vacant for a few weeks now."

"So you just decided to be good neighbors." More of an accusation than a statement.

Nami reached in to grab a mug and at the same time put a hand on Robin's shoulder. "Maybe you should go sit back down..."

"I-" Robin started to say, cutting herself off. She didn't have the energy to argue, converse, or even stand for much longer. She quickly dismissed herself back to the couch, sans coffee mug.

"Sorry about her, shit's been really rough on her lately. We're trying to pull her out of it," Nami said. The two nodded, understanding.

Luffy took a sip of coffee and immediately his face contorted into a grimace. Far too bitter for his tastes. He preferred his coffee to be a thick sludge of mostly sugar with a bit of a coffee flavor. It's worth noting that he hasn't had his style of coffee in years. "So, who are you guys again?" He asked, forgetting that the coffee in his hand wasn't up to his standards and taking another sip, making another bitter face.

"Oh jeeze, we forgot to introduce ourselves! I'm Coby, this is Vivi. We live together across the hall." He gestured back over his shoulder at the open door behind them.

Luffy nodded, "I'm Luffy, that's Nami, and she's Robin." Another sip and a shiver. Nami silently removed the mug from his hand.

"Nice to meet all of you! Even you back there!" Vivi smiled and waved back to Robin, sitting on the couch. "If you need anything, and I mean ANYTHING, please don't hesitate to knock!"

"I can't promise that we can help, but we'll certainly try!" Coby said, smiling good-naturedly. The two of them said their goodbyes and headed back to their room, leaving the tray behind.

Nami shut the door, sipping at her coffee. "Well they seemed nice."

"Seemed," Robin muttered.

"Did you know them or something?" Luffy asked, walking to the couch and dropping down next to Robin.

"No, but if they're here, under Crocodile, we have to assume the worst."

He shrugged. "I dunno, maybe they're actually nice? Is this Crocodile guy really that bad?"

Robin slowly turned her head toward him, wearing the face of a woman who had clearly seen some shit. "I assure you, he really is that bad. You don't know him like I do. He's up to something here. It's always an angle with that man…"

Nami shrugged from the small kitchen. "Well, fortunately we aren't staying here too long. We'll be on the road later today, putting all this behind us. Right?"

Robin didn't say anything.

"Put it aaalll behind us. The three of us. All hitting the road. Leaving. For greener pastures."

Robin still said nothing.

"You're coming with us, right?" Luffy asked, looking right at her.

This time, Robin sighed. Loudly. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her legs, and let her head hang. "I don't know. Maybe. I still need time to think."

"Well, there isn't really a lot to think about… We're your friends, Robin. We're not just gonna leave you behind!"

Another sigh, this one with a mix of groaning in it. "Can we table this for now? I'm still extremely tired and I would like some quiet time."

"Fine. Then I am going to go into that office there and pretend the computer still works and pretend I am playing video games!" Luffy said with a tone of indignant fury. He stomped off past Nami and around the corner.

"Hey, Robin..." Nami started.

"I'M HAVING SO MUCH FUN WITH THIS GAME!" Luffy shouted from the office.

"THAT'S GREAT!" Nami called back. She turned back to Robin. "Just go ahead and take it easy today, alright? I'm gonna go shower and find out what to do to get our shit back. We'll just head back to the van and head for Boston, alright? You can stay in town, no problem."

The idea of getting back in a car and driving somewhere else made Robin feel sick. But the idea of staying put also made her feel sick. She shook her head, staying silent. Eventually Nami understood she wouldn't get a response out of her and headed for the bathroom.

While the water was running, Luffy lost interest in imaginary Call of Duty and wandered back out into the main room. Robin had laid back down on the couch, her back to the rest of the world. He couldn't tell if she was sleeping or not, but to his relief she was at least breathing.

He stared at her, sitting in the recliner that faced the couch at an angle. In his mind, he tried to formulate something to say to her, but the words were a jumble. Like Nami said last night, there wasn't a set of guidelines to follow for this situation. Not that he would know them anyway, if there were. The good news is that they would soon have a lengthy car ride that she'd be essentially trapped in. She'd have to hear whatever he said.

Robin was, in fact, awake and could feel Luffy staring at her from where he was sitting. She knew the kid wanted to talk to her, his simple mind telling him that if he was just nice enough to her or said all the right things, she'd be instantly better. But it wasn't that simple, and she couldn't find the strength to explain that to him right now anyway.

There was too much noise. Even if Luffy wasn't saying anything now, his presence, Nami's presence were still noise to her. Like the static that played over every dead radio station across the country. For now, she just wanted true isolation, where no one would judge her for failing, or pity her for falling apart.

The blackness of her thoughts were suddenly scrambled by the bathroom door swinging open. She couldn't see Nami standing there, still wearing the clothes she wore and slept in last night, but with her long hair finally rid of all the dust and dirt it had accumulated. "HOLY shit. I forgot how amazing that felt. Luffy. You need to take a shower right now."

He groaned, sinking down in his chair. "Awww I'll do it later…"

"If you want to sleep in the bed with me again, you'll take a shower right the hell now."

Sleep with her? Did Robin hear that right? Those two slept in the same bed…?

Luffy got up with the groan of a teenager being told to take out the trash and shuffled into the bathroom.

"You should take one, Robin. Might help clear your head a bit. Plus who knows when we'll get the chance next?"

Robin offered a noncommittal grunt.

"You wanna come with me? Walk around the building?"

Another grunt and that was the end of the conversation.

When it was Luffy's turn to step out of the shower, Nami almost didn't recognize him. While she'd only been away from home for a little over two months, Luffy had gone YEARS without the comforts she had grown used to. The kid had obviously tried taking care of himself during his isolation, but standing in the rain to rinse off was a poor substitute for a hot shower.

"That's amazing…" she said, eyeing him up and down as he dried his hair. For the record, yes, he was dressed, let's make that clear.

"What?" he asked.

"You're just…" she shrugged. "You clean up well. There's a pretty… good-looking boy underneath all the shit."

He grinned dumbly at her, cheeks getting a little red. "Aww…"

"Hey I'm gonna wander around and see about getting our gear back. Wanna come with?"

His eyes lit up and his head bobbed up and down, a big smile plastered across his face. "Hell yeah! I gotta get my bat back!"

"Your bat? What's up with that thing, anyway?" Nami asked as she slid her shoes on.

"I got my score up 55 points with that bat! There is no way in hell I'm goin' anywhere without it!" The proud smile on his face faded before the two of them could walk out the door. "Wait."

Luffy turned around, stepping back into the main room. "Hey, Robin."

Something about his rough tone made her lift her head up just a little, so she could see him across the room.

"Don't do anything stupid while we're gone."

She meant to glare at him. Do something stupid? Wasn't that his job? But there was something about his face, the way his eyes looked, like they were sending a different message than the one his mouth conveyed. There was anger, or irritation. Frustration. Like a father who has to punish their kid for the millionth time. But there was also fear, just behind everything else, there was a hint of fear. It took her a second to pick it up, and her face softened.

Luffy had told her not to kill herself.

I won't tell you whether or not the thought had crossed her mind. I will tell you that Robin's mental state was a tangle of wires behind a TV that had "VIDEO" burned into the upper right corner. The point is, she picked up on his message, and nodded slowly. "I'll be fine here."

He seemed satisfied with that answer. "Good! We'll be back in a bit!"

In the hallway, Nami leaned forward to look at Luffy's face. "Hey… What was that about?"

He waved a hand dismissively. "Ah, there's nothing to worry about now! No big deal!"

"You are a mysterious man, Luffy," she told him with a grin.

They walked up and down flights of stairs until both of them, even the inhuman infinite-stamina zombie-killing survivor-man, were on the verge of collapsing. And yet, there was no sign of any armory or weapons cache. At least not one that people could access freely.

Both of them were slumped against a wall in the second floor hallway, trying to catch their breath. Luffy glanced out of a nearby window. The window overlooked the front entrance of the apartment, which had been barricaded off using cars, sheets of metal, barbed wire, and other fun stuff like that. It created a safe area on the ground where people could walk around and enjoy the fresh air.

Even from up there, Luffy could still recognize Coby, his distinct pink hair standing out against the grass like a waypoint on a map. "You Are Here."

"Hey it's Coby! He probably knows his way around this place! C'mon, we can catch him if we hurry!" It would seem that Luffy had tapped into his spare energy reserves, because he was suddenly a bundle of excitement.

Nami had to be pulled down the stairs, her legs still on fire. If not for Luffy holding her wrist as he led her, she probably would have just tumbled down and collapsed at the bottom in an exhausted and sexy heap.

To their pleasant surprise, Coby appeared to actually be armed. They had caught him as he was rounding the corner of the building, heading away from the scattered group of people congregating around the front entrance, walking close to barrier that surrounded the perimeter.

"COBY! YO!" Luffy called out to him.

The kid jumped, whirling around at the sound with a handaxe raised. "GET-! Oh! It's you two!" He lowered the axe, hid it behind his back to show he wasn't a threat to them. "S-Sorry, I'm a little jumpy right now. I'm on perimeter duty for now, I've gotta see if there are any breaks in the wall."

Nami was putting all of her weight on Luffy's back, breathing heavily, a stitch in her side. "I'm… I'm really glad… We caught you… We have to… Ask… You something… Jeeze…"

Coby nodded, glancing at the wall. "Well, I'd be happy to answer any of your questions, but I've really got to work on this… But you two are welcome to follow me! So long as you keep your distance. You know, for safety's sake."

Nami was about to tell him that it could wait, but Luffy answered first, saying "Yeah we can walk with you!" Of course, because Nami was behind him, he couldn't see the incredulous stare she had pulled on him.

Coby led a few feet in front of them, occasionally glancing back to make sure they were still with him. Most of his attention was on the wall. He would examine the occasional seams that formed when one sheet of metal ended and another one began.

"So, what did you want to know?" he asked without looking back at them.

Nami managed to take a deep breath, but her side still ached. Whatever, she could deal with that. As long as Luffy kept letting her lean on him. "Well first, we were just wondering… When we get our gear back. We had guns and stuff when we got here."

"Ah, that might be a problem… We aren't allowed to carry weapons around unless Crocodile says so. I only got this axe because I'm on perimeter duty and he doesn't give that job to just anyone. My wife and I both work the walls at least twice a week."

Nami scoffed. "Figures. Wait… Wife…?"

Coby turned his head to face them, his cheeks going noticeably pink. "Yeah! Vivi! You met her this morning?"

"Do you mean wife, like, literally? Or is it just your cutesy nickname for her?" Nami asked, an eyebrow raised.

He went even pinker, smiling and scratching the back of his head in an embarrassed, nervous sort of way. "She's my wife. We're married!"

"But-! You're like, twelve!" Luffy exclaimed.

"We're seventeen!" Coby said defensively. "And we both realized that there was nothing stopping us from getting married, so we both organized a little ceremony and… that was that!"

Luffy, who was 20 years old, single, and had never held a job or been in a position where he had to take care of anyone but himself, said "Wow! Congratulations! That's really cool!"

Nami, who was 21, also single, and still lived at home with her mother, followed up with "That's actually super cute, good work."

"A-awww, thanks, you two! I'll tell her what you said when I'm done here," Coby stammered, looking away deliberately so they couldn't see him trying to hide his rainbow-spewing joy. When he took back to the task of checking the wall, there was a noticeable bounce in his step.

"All adorableness aside, we did have some more we needed to know," Nami said.

"Of course! Ask away!" his voice had a lilt to it, the two of them seemed to have put Coby on cloud nine.

"We don't need our stuff to carry it around, we just need it because we need to get back on the road," she continued,

At this Coby seemed to lose his pep. "You want to leave..?"

"Yeah! We aren't gonna stay here! No offense, this place seems cool and all but we got stuff to do!" Luffy said.

"That… that might be a problem…" Coby said as he shoved his shoulder against a loose piece of metal to snap it back into place. "Like I said, the weapons are all kept securely and… well, you'd have to get a key from Crocodile if you want to take a car out."

The two of them didn't say anything, forcing him to continue explaining. "Maybe you've noticed, we're not... The best survivors here. We depend on the walls, our gardens on the roof, the solar panels to keep the place running... We've cleared out most everything the city has to offer at this point. But by doing so? Kinda... Shot ourselves in the foot... Aheh..." Coby scratched the back of his head. "It's almost impossible to get a car out of the city. Roads are jammed up! And walking without a weapon is impossible either..."

Coby leaned on the wall, putting his ear to it, listening for any gurgled groaning on the other side. "It's for our own good," he said when he was satisfied to hear nothing. "Crocodile holds onto the guns, it keeps us from trying to run off on our own. Confiscates anything that comes through and keeps a diligent check on everything in store. He only lets a few elites out on raids or scavs. The guys you probably met when he found you out there. Heck, I have a key to the room we keep everything in, but there's always a guard posted. 24 hours a day..."

"This is starting to sound more like a prison than a haven," Nami thought aloud.

Coby said nothing, just shrugged.

"So we can't just leave?! That's so stupid!" Luffy exclaimed.

There was another shrug of Coby's shoulders. "He says it's for our safety and no one here is really in a position to challenge him on it. To be honest, I'd rather be on this side of the wall than the other, anyway," he said, laughing uneasily.

Nami rubbed at her eyes, "That's ridiculous, we'll just have to talk to him. I've got family out there, I've gotta get back to them."

"I don't think he'll like that…" Coby muttered.

Nami rolled her eyes, "I don't care! He'll have to deal with it. We're taking OUR gear and leaving. We aren't stealing anything we didn't come in with!"

"You're welcome to try, but he's not the most… reasonable person…"

Luffy pounded his hand into his fist. "Well, if we can't reason with him, then I'll just kick his ass until he listens!"

Coby flung his hands up defensively, eyes wide. "N- No! Don't do that! Do not do that, that is a terrible idea!"

Nami squeezed his shoulders from where she was still leaning on him. "Y-yeah let me talk to him, killer. Let's not go straight to violence." Although, as quietly as possible, under her breath, she muttered "At least not yet…"

"I'm starting to think you people might be dangerous…" Coby tried his hardest to make it sound like a joke, but there was absolutely some tension in his voice.

Nami winked at him, sticking her tongue out. "Well, don't fret too much over it, we'll be gone from here before you know it!"


	7. Chapter 7

Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance

Chapter 7

One whole week later, they were still in the apartment.

Crocodile had proven to be the most stubborn man Nami had ever met, ever since she ran into Luffy. However, unlike Luffy, Crocodile was also the most arrogant son of a bitch she had the displeasure of speaking to, and he was undeniably skilled at dodging whatever question she could throw at him. She must have heard him say "I'll get back to you on that" a thousand times by now.

And yet he always seemed to find time for Robin. Robin would probably be doing much better now if Crocodile didn't seem to make it a point to find her and strike up a conversation.

Conversations with him usually steered towards the CDC, her cult following, the trip from Canada to Atlanta. He claimed he just wanted to know what she had been up to. Just wanted to see where her life had taken her since the divorce. What's that? It took her through hell and back? Why isn't that a shame. Not that he can say he understands! Why look at him, he runs an apartment and rules over an entire group of loyal survivors that all adore him! Meanwhile Robin has… two children. Or something.

It didn't take a genius to tell he was trying to goad a reaction out of her.

Their divorce was obviously not exactly amicable. Or clean. Or simple. Or anything good anyone could say about anything. He was sure, after Zombie Day, that she would end up chewed to bits. In fact, he was actually hoping that would be the case. But now that she was back in his general vicinity, he felt foolish for wishing that. Oh, not guilty at all, don't get him wrong. He was glad she was still alive because now he had something to needle her with.

At the very least, she had managed to get off of the couch and pass the fog of her despair. Now she was just irritated. Constantly. She tried her best to control it, but Luffy and Nami could tell how tense she was. Every little thing pushed her closer to the brink of an explosion. Crocodile passive-aggressively insulting her in the hallways pissed her off. Luffy and Nami discussing escape plans as though it were a guarantee she was going with them pissed her off. Coby and Vivi stopping by to say hello pissed her off.

Maybe it wasn't fair to the people just trying to help, but at the very least she didn't fly off the handle. She internalized it like a mature adult would.

Nami, likewise, was at the end of her rope. She was out of options, and time was running out. Every day in Atlanta was one more day not spent at home. And as Luffy kept suggesting whenever he got the chance, resorting to violence might just be the only way.

Yes, they were still sleeping together. Well, not like that, but you know. It was a much more enjoyable experience now that the two of them had the means to take regular showers. Luffy was comfortable. And I mean that in two ways. The first is that Luffy found the bed to be a source of comfort. It was warm, had soft blankets, and fluffy pillows. The second is that Nami found LUFFY to be a source of comfort. His presence in the room made her feel safer, for whatever reason that could be…

She knew. She knew the reason. She just didn't want to say it in her own mind.

The curious thing about all this was Coby and Vivi. The married couple kept finding themselves in the trio's apartment. Luffy didn't mind at all, of course. He was happy for more company. It was their damned helpful nature that did it. They couldn't resist a group in need. Hell, by this point, they were in the plan. They were a part of it.

What little plan there was.

So here we were, day seven, and Nami was throwing up her arms while she sat at the kitchen table. "Screw it. I give up. There is no freaking way to get through to that guy!"

Coby shrugged in an I-Told-You-So way. "He's stubborn, he doesn't like people challenging his authority."

"I'm not even challenging his authority! I'm trying to ask him for our stuff back so we can leave! We aren't going to cause any kind of commotion!"

"He thinks that's a challenge to his authority," Robin suddenly spoke up from the couch on the other side of the room. She had been reading, making just a slight display of trying to ignore the scheming going on at the kitchen table. Now, she didn't even bother to look up from her book. "It's like I've been telling you. He's an arrogant, paranoid jackass who refuses to accept anyone's opinion but his own. You'll never get through to him. Even worse, he's in a position of authority. Give him power and he wants more. Too stubborn to let any go because he thinks it makes him weak. People like the ones here, only looking for safety and security? That's who he preys on."

And before you know it, you start believing the things he says, she added silently in her own head.

Nami stayed silent for some time. She processed what Robin said. Finally, she lowered her head onto the table. "Fine. I'm calling it."

"Calling it?!" Vivi exclaimed. "All that work and you're just giving up?"

"Hey, hey, you can't do that! I'm not allowing it!" Luffy had jumped to his feet now, slamming his hands on the table, which made Nami jump.

"C-Calm down, both of you! Luffy, don't slam the table when I've got my damn head resting on it!" She sat back up and sighed sharply. "I'm giving up on reasoning with him. Plan B. Luffy, you beat him up."

"YES!"

"NO!" screamed the married couple simultaneously.

"That's not going to accomplish anything!" Coby exclaimed.

Luffy just flexed in front of them. "Sure it will. I'll beat him up and we'll get access to the guns."

"N-no, that's not how things work..." Coby insisted.

Nami appeared to be in deep thought. "But what if it did work that way..."

"But it doesn't! That's the whole point!" Vivi said.

"But what if we could make it work that way? You said you two work the walls and you're allowed into the weapons cache when you do, right?"

They both nodded.

"Well, what if while you were loading up... Something big happened? Like, say, a dangerous lunatic-" she gestured to Luffy "-suddenly started beating the shit out of Crocodile?"

Luffy seemed pretty happy to be referred to as a dangerous lunatic.

"You said yourself that only a select few are armed at any time, right? So if Crocodile's getting wrecked, then the few guards that are around would have to come running! Thus leaving you free to raid the cache!"

Vivi bit at her thumbnail. "I'm not exactly sure how I feel about using physical assault… as a distraction."

Nami winked at her, "You don't have to like it, you just have to go along with it!"

Coby, also feeling uncomfortable, raised his hand. "So… Once we have the weapons, how do we get out…? The gate will still be shut."

Crossing her arms, Nami leaned back in her chair to think for a second. "Hm. Well! By that point, we'll all be armed with guns. And the guards will be busy dealing with Crocodile being hamburger meat. So… We'll just threaten our way out."

Both teenagers turned a sick pale. "Oh… Good… We have it all worked out…" Vivi muttered, holding her stomach.

Luffy could barely contain his excitement. "This is the best plan I've ever heard for anything EVER!"

The confident grin that came after a brilliant plan spread across Nami's face. "And I still have the keys to the van parked outside the city. So we just make our way back there, pile in, and we are leaving Georgia behind. Just a few more days here and then we're GONE, people. All five of us."

"I guess everyone has to make… moral sacrifices these days…" Coby muttered. Suddenly he lifted his head. "Wait, the five of us? So we ARE coming with you, then?"

Luffy and Nami stopped in their tracks to stare blankly at the couple. "Well… Yeah?"

"You want to, right?"

"I-I mean of course we do!" Coby stammered.

Vivi similarly stammered, "A-absolutely! We just… Well, we weren't really asked… You all just kind of assumed we were going to go along with it."

Nami and Luffy let this information process through. The two of them simultaneously nodding slowly as it hit them.

"Well… Uh… Hm."

"I guess we're lucky it all worked out then?"

It was at this time that Robin closed her book. She shut her eyes, leaning back on the couch. "Everything works out perfectly, doesn't it?"

The other four looked her way. There was a feeling of apprehension in the air, hovering over all of them.

"Except you miscounted. I'm not going with you. This is where we part ways."

The teenagers gasped, Nami exclaimed "What?!" And Luffy rolled his eyes.

"Aw come on! Don't say stuff like that! Quit being ridiculous, of course you're coming with us. You can't stay here!"

"Yeah, you're gonna live here with your jackass ex-husband? That's what you want?" Nami said.

Robin shook her head slowly. "It's not a matter of what I want. This is just where I should be."

"Oh that's bullshit!" Luffy said. His voice was getting louder.

"Um!" A tiny voice chirped. It belong to Vivi who was on her feet, pulling Coby up by his collar. "This seems to be a private conversation so we're gonna leave now," she let out a horridly nervous laugh. "S-see you all later!"

The trio watched them shuffle out of the apartment and when the door closed, Luffy's head snapped back to Robin.

"That's still bullshit. You hate this place! You haven't been happy since we got here! And if we leave without you, then you're gonna be all alone!"

Nami got out of her seat, hovering behind Luffy. "So we're doing this now? We're in it? Because I've been thinking about what I want to say."

"Maybe I want to be alone..." Robin muttered, or more like forced the words past her lips.

"What the hell does that mean?! Robin, do you not like us or something..?" Nami was standing next to Luffy now.

"Of course I do, but that's not the point! The point is that..." She sighed, dragging her hands down her face. "The point is that I'm going to end up alone, so I may as well make it of my own accord."

"Who said you were gonna end up alone?! We're taking you with us so you can STAY with us, that's how it works!" Luffy said this with such sincerity that Nami took it as him actually believing Robin didn't understand the concept of togetherness.

Robin shook her head, "You don't understand," she told them. "Every important relationship I've ever had has ended with them either dying or leaving me. Crocodile left me. My followers left me. I lost everyone I cared about when the outbreak happened. And do you know why?"

The younger duo shifted uneasily.

"It's because I wasn't useful to them anymore. I wasn't good enough. When Crocodile realized that I was too smart for him to keep manipulating, that's when we divorced. My followers left after the… motel. Hell, even the zombies, they-" she let out a laughter, possibly to fight back tears. "Even they don't come near me anymore!"

"That's not really a bad..." Nami started to say before Robin cut her off.

"I know it's not a bad thing! But that's not the problem! The problem is that, being immune is the only reason I've lived this long. I'm not particularly fit. I don't have exceptional aim or superb survival skills. I don't have much to contribute to a group or settlement. I had my immunity. That made me important. Without it, there's nothing I have that's worth keeping around. So this place is perfect for me. No one expects anyone to try. They're all... Perfectly complacent."

"That's even more bullshit than what you said earlier," was all Luffy said.

Something in Robin snapped at that. "Then what am I missing?! Tell me! Tell me the reason you or anyone would want to keep me around!"

"Because you're our FRIEND!" he shouted to her like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Mostly because, to him at the very least, it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Why would I need any other reason to want you to stay with us?

She slowly lifted her head to look up at him. "That's your reason? I'm your friend?"

"Yeah! I don't care about all that other stuff! I just care about you getting out of here with us so you can be okay!"

"That's absolutely ridiculous..." Robin muttered.

"I'm gonna back him up on that," Nami said. "I don't care that you're not some crazy zombie killing machine or you're a super-survivor like Luffy. I care that you're hurting and you think you don't deserve to get better."

Robin was quiet for long time. When she didn't respond, Nami continued. "Look, back in Ohio? I didn't stick with you because I believed in saving the world. I stuck with you because I knew getting to Atlanta was important to you. It could've been anything, I still would've helped you get here. And I'm sure it's the same for you, right Luffy?" She said, turning to him to back her up.

He shrugged, "Yeah! I didn't really get the whole cure thing anyway, I just thought you were really cool and wanted to hang out with you!"

Robin's face softened some. She wasn't looking at either of them, but they could tell she was deep in thought.

"Look," Nami said, letting out a sigh. "Just come with us to Boston. Even if you don't believe what we're saying, at least just stick with us until then. It's a way better place to figure out your life than here."

"You really just want me around because you like me…?"

"Believe it or not, Robin, there's still a small bit of empathy left in the world. So… We're good?"

Robin stood up and walked toward them. They were close enough together that she could essentially fall on both of them and have them support her while her arms wrapped around their backs.

"I'm just tired. I'm tired of things not going right. I'm tired of having hope taken away from me. I figured... If I could just stay here... I'd be stagnating, but at least I wouldn't have anything stolen from me."

Luffy and Nami both squeezed their arms around her. "Just one more time, alright? Just try it one more time. We're here for you," Nami said.

"Alright... Fine. One more time," came Robin's response.

Luffy was ecstatic, squeezing both girls tightly. "Good! Good! Awesome! All of us, we're totally inseparable! We're all gonna live in the same house and have parties every night and hang out all the time!"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves, sweetie…" Nami mumbled as sweetly as she could. "Why don't we get to Boston before we start talking about housing? I don't know if my mom would like me suddenly moving in with a bunch of strangers."

A day or so of planning later, it was finally time to act. Granted, the plan they came up with was not along the lines of a bank heist, and they didn't have time to hash out every inconsistency, but in their defense, none of them were tactical thinkers.

The most significant new addition to their plan was that Nami had to accompany Luffy when they confronted Crocodile. During planning, the group quickly realized simply letting Luffy off his collar had too many ways of going wrong. They also realized that he would listen to whatever Nami said, which they could use to their advantage.

Nami felt somewhat guilty over treating Luffy like an attack dog, but she also liked the control over another person this granted her.

Meanwhile, Coby was responsible for getting the gear out of storage. He was to check in with the guard on duty, take out his one allotted weapon for wall patrol, and then stall as long as he could until the commotion the fight would cause made its way up there.

"What if the guard doesn't want to leave…?" Coby had asked one night.

"Then you knock him out when he's distracted!" was Luffy's response.

Coby was really hoping it wouldn't come to that. Because he especially was not looking forward to the next part. Once the weapons were in his possession, he had to take them to Robin and Vivi.

Robin and Vivi would then, using the guns they had just stolen, threaten their way out of the gate. Along the way, they would gather up Luffy and Nami.

There were many problems with this plan, tons and tons. Vivi fruitlessly pointed them out, saying that it relies too heavily on other people reacting to violence the way they want. To which Robin would respond with "Crocodile's men are animals. Violence is the only thing they will understand. If innocent people have to get involved, then so be it."

This just made Vivi feel sick, and Nami's assurance that it was just a bluff and they weren't going to actually shoot anyone didn't make her feel a whole lot better.

Now if you don't mind, I'd rather just kill the suspense right here and now, and tell you that of course our protagonists managed to escape. Otherwise it wouldn't be much of a story. So if you don't care about the details, then go ahead and skip to the next chapter now. I would really recommend you skip ahead because the scene I am about to describe might be far more anticlimactic than you imagine and as such you may want to spare yourself the disappointment.

To start off, let me ask a question. Have you ever screwed up so badly that it wrapped clean around the scale and went back to succeeding triumphantly?

The plan fell apart almost instantly actually. Luffy and Nami approached Crocodile, catching him by hovering outside his room until he opened the door to make his rounds around the apartment. Down the hall was one of his elites, a big, really cool dude with the even cooler name of Kuzan. They wanted him nearby, within earshot, so he could come running when the pummeling began.

"Hey! I need to ask you something!" Nami called out, just as Crocodile was shutting his apartment door.

"Oh damn it… Hello! Yes! What can I do for you?" He forced a smile that they could easily tell meant nothing but spite.

"I'm just gonna ask one last time, can we please. PLEASE. Have our gear back so we can leave? We just want to go home. It's been over a week now. I have people waiting for me." She said it as if she had repeated it a million times. Mostly because she had repeated it a million times, it was not a simile.

"I'm positive I've already made my position on this clear," Crocodile said as he tried to walk past them. Nami shifted into his way again.

"Actually, no you haven't! You still haven't given me a reason why you're keeping us here!"

Using his one hand, he tried to slide Nami out of the way, but she stood adamantly in front of him. "Why are you being so difficult? After everything I've done?"

"You haven't done anything! That is the problem! Look, you either give us answers, or things are going to get messy!"

"Oh my! So quick to jump straight to violence! Why don't you calm down, there's a time and a place for civil words. No need to resort to fisticuffs."

Luffy was nodding sagely along with Crocodile's words. "He's right, Nami. This is a good time to try and talk our problems out."

Nami slowly turned towards him. "What."

"On the other hand, it's also a good time to fight!" and he followed that up with a right hook into Crocodile's face. The fight was on.

Then it was over.

Crocodile hit the ground like a burlap sack filled with nickels. Luffy and Nami waited for a second, Luffy slowly losing his fighting stance as the seconds ticked on with no movement from Crocodile. He was totally knocked out.

Nami nudged him with the toe of her shoe. "Hhhhhhhuh. I uh. I thought. He'd last longer."

"Hey! What the hell is going on over here!" That would be Kuzan ambling up behind them.

Meanwhile Coby was busy sweating bullets. The weapons cache was a repurposed apartmrnt, guarded today by a Drama Kid named Bentham, a flamboyant middle aged man who used every opportunity in his life for interpretive dance. Right now, Bentham was hovering behind Coby as the kid made an effort to look like he was being discerning with his weapon choice, rather than stalling for time.

Coby was a nice kid. Raised not to lie or steal or make disruptions. He had dreams of being a police officer in a small town where he would be tasked with helping citizens cross the street or rescue kittens from trees.

He was, in fact, the least equipped person for the task of knocking someone out and stealing guns.

That being said he had no qualms about killing zombies, they weren't human and didn't count for shit.

He nearly jumped out of his skin when Bentham's radio chirped to life. "Mmmmyeeess?" He heard Bentham answer.

Coby couldn't hear much of the other side of the conversation, but Bentham's love of his own voice filled in some of the gaps. "Yes? Well I'll be damned! Out cold, is he? Naturally, naturally. Yes the boy is still here. I'll be up there before you know it!"

Bentham snapped his fingers to get Coby's attention. "Boy, put down the hammer! You're coming with me!"

"Wh-what's the problem?! Sir?!" Coby stammered out, snapping to attention with a ball-peen hammer in his hands.

Bentham shrugged. "Oh it seems some troublemakers went and cold-cocked our dear leader. Knocked him right out! Kuzan wants us all up there to deal with them."

"Knocked… him out…?" Coby whispered, following Bentham out into the hallway. Did that mean the fight was over? Was he still expected to go with the plan and try to take Bentham down? He wasn't sure if he could knock him out unarmed, but maybe a strong right to the back of the head could do it… However, every time he managed to work up the nerve to make a fist, Bentham would whirl around to say whatever bizarre thought popped into his head.

Bentham was an oddball, but mostly harmless. Coby would feel bad assaulting anyone, but hitting this guy would make him feel even worse. Of course, by the time the kid had steeled himself to strike out, they were standing in front of Crocodile's unconscious body.

Kuzan had Luffy and Nami sitting on the ground against the wall, like elementary school kids who had got caught feeding another kid worms at recess. Coby and Nami exchanged a quick look, and both understood that their best bet was to act like they didn't know each other. That went tits up when Luffy called out "Coby!"

Bentham stared at Coby. "Is that your name..? I never thought to ask, after all this time. Also! You know each other?"

"We're… neighbors…" Nami muttered through her teeth, giving Luffy a surreptitious elbow to the side.

"Good to know," Kuzan said. He was still looking straight down at Luffy and Nami, arms crossed in front of him. "Maybe you can shed some light as to why these two would punch our leader in the face."

It was time for Coby's secret latent lying skills to suddenly awaken and allow him to take control of the situation. Instead, he just stammered out "N-no I don't know a-anything about that!"

Kuzan squinted at him, clearly not buying it. Fortunately, Coby was saved by Luffy shouting "I already told you! I hit him cuz he deserved it!"

"You hit him enough times to knock him out, though? I'll admit Crocodile can be difficult to work with, but did he deserve such a beating?" Bentham asked, glancing down at his unconscious leader. He silently wondered if they should try to drag him inside.

"No, Luffy only hit him once. We thought he was tougher than he actually was. Look," Nami said, shaking her head with an exasperated sigh. "None of this would've happened if Crocodile had just heard me out. Okay? I've been trying to get this guy's attention ever since we got here! I just want to go HOME!"

"What are you talking about...?" Kuzan asked. He couldn't make the connection between going home and punching someone.

"Okay. Are you going to listen? Are you going to actually listen to me and not walk away or brush me off or anything?"

With a roll of his eyes, Kuzan said that he would.

So Luffy and Nami launched into a summary of everything that had happened to them. The same summary, more or less, they gave Crocodile several days ago. The only difference is that, as they approached the end of their story, Nami turned to Luffy and shrugged. Clearly the jig was up, and so she continued talking to explain the escape plan that had so easily fallen apart.

"But as you can see, everything just collapsed right at step one. I have to say, I did not expect him to be so much of a pansy," Nami concluded, nudging Crocodile with her foot again.

"He's not a pansy, I'm just that tough," Luffy said.

"Could be both," Kuzan muttered. He looked to Nami. "That is possibly one of the dumbest plans I have ever heard in my life. You're lucky it crashed now, you could've gotten yourselves or someone else hurt."

"No, but see, we weren't going to actually shoot anyone, we were just going to threaten to do it…" Nami said, looking away out of embarrassment.

"That's still incredibly unsafe. I can't even fathom how moronic your plan was. Far too dependent on people reacting the way you want while they're in a state of panic. And you were going to get him to attack Bentham?" Kuzan gestured to Coby, who was still shaking a little. "Look at him. He couldn't hurt a fly!"

Coby tried not to look offended.

"I get it! I get it, it wasn't a good plan! But it's what we had, okay?! If your stupid boss had just listened to me, we wouldn't have had to try it! It's all his fault!"

"I have to wonder about the logic behind our leader, bringing this group in! They are clearly not the kind of people we generally take under our wing~" Bentham said, a slight lilt in his voice.

"I'm positive he only brought you in so he could mess with his ex-wife," Kuzan muttered. He crossed his arms in front of him. "Alright, with our leader down and out-"

"Are we going to get him off the floor any time soon?" Bentham interrupted.

"I guess it's up to me to make an executive decision..." He scratched his head. "I guess the expected thing is I take you round back and kill you-"

"I'LL FIGHT YOU IF YOU TRY ANYTHING!" Luffy suddenly roared.

"But that sounds like more work than I'm willing to do today..." He finished, ignoring Luffy. "You don't plan on coming back here at all, do you?"

Luffy and Nami shook their heads. Coby did too, even though no one was looking at him.

"Alright. Bentham, get Paula on the line, tell her to track Nico Robin down, bring her to the weapons cache. I'm just gonna let them go."

"A-ARE YOU SERIOUS?!" Nami yelped. "Just like that?! You're really gonna let us out?!"

Kuzan shrugged his shoulders. "Look, I don't wanna deal with trying to rehabilitate you or punish you or put you in isolation until you're... Ready to rejoin the others or whatever. So... Screw it. If you three aren't ever coming back, might as well just send you out."

"THANK you! Oh my God, thank you for actually being reasonable!" Nami said. She turned to Luffy and the two of them grinned at each other.

Coby cleared his throat. "Um! Can Vivi and I... Go with them? Is that okay?"

"Who's Vivi?" Kuzan asked.

"My wife? She lives with me..? We both work the wall..?"

"Oh. Sure. Whatever. I'll be honest, I don't really know you or anything."

And just like that, it was settled. Bentham accompanied the trio back down to the weapons cache, meeting up with a confused Robin and Vivi. It took a bit of explaining to get everyone on the same page, and while Vivi had tons of questions, Robin was quick to keep her quiet. This was one gift horse whose mouth would go unlooked.

Before long, the five of them were standing on the opposite side of the giant steel gate that had been keeping them in. Kuzan halfheartedly wished them farewell as he shut the gate and they stood there a moment, coming to terms with what happened.

They were out. Just like that.

"I think this is the first time catastrophic failure has worked out in our favor," Robin noted.

"How often do you experience catastrophic failure…?" Vivi asked, dreading the answer.

Nami thought about how to word her answer. "Well, considering the world we live in, every day is kind of a catastrophic failure."

Luffy, clutching his precious bat tightly in his hands, couldn't have been more proud of himself. "The important thing is that we learned that physical violence can solve every problem!"

The others didn't feel quite as triumphant and eventually Robin turned her back on the apartment building. "Let's get to the van and get out of here."

To wrap things up here, this incident, this apathy-induced spark of resistance, would eventually lead to Crocodile's downfall as a leader. The survivors living in the apartment would take note of Kuzan's lazy rebellion, his willingness to bend the rules while his leader was incapacitated.

The five of them had unwittingly sparked a revolution, and none of them would ever know what happened.

Not important, but interesting.


	8. Chapter 8

Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance

Chapter 8

"Humanity's greatest advantage over the undead is our ability to work together towards a common goal. All zombies have one singular objective, a need to consume the flesh of the living. They have no motivation. They are not intentionally looking to add to their numbers. The growing population of the undead is merely a side effect of their base desire for consumption.

Yet despite this objective, universal to all members of the undead, they have never once shown the mental ability to cooperate with one another. They remain unaware of anything beyond the potential meal directly in front of them. They cannot think, or plan, or operate even the simplest of tools.

In stark contrast, we as humans are granted the advantage of strategy. When a group of humans share a similar goal, we will instinctively seek to pool our resources, combine our individual skills, and work for the betterment of the group. This, above all things, is our greatest weapon against the zombie. As long as we continue to work together, we will continue to survive as a species."

-From the audio logs of Dr. Trafalgar Law, recorded 96 days after Zombie Day.

Everyone knew that this was the right thing to do. The opportunity was too good to pass up, and they were all experienced enough to handle it.

They had arrived in a small town in Virginia, the kind of little town that you wouldn't think anyone actually lived in, even though they had to. Where the stores were all souvenir shops for the nearby beach, where there weren't any franchise stores except for maybe a Little Ceaser's. Of course, the population of the town was currently zero. And unlike New York, the odds of a lone survivor hiding out somewhere were pretty much nil. They had already made a basic sweep of the place, looking for any supplies or friendly faces, but came up empty-handed.

Save for the bar. A small town like this had to have a sports bar, and this one had chains on the double doors. Like everything else, it was a locally owned place, so it had a certain personal charm to its exterior. Well, assuming you could look past the hastily boarded windows. It was the only building locked up like this, and the reason why was spray-painted on the double doors.

"Don't Dead, Open Inside," Luffy read aloud. "Izzat a riddle or something? Like… We're not dead… So it's open for us…"

The other four stared at him. "It… It says 'Don't open. Dead inside," Nami stated.

Luffy's eyes widened and he nodded sagely. "Ohhh… That does make more sense…"

Coby sucked in a breath, he was the one to step forward, to the boarded windows. They weren't boarded up completely and he could shine a flashlight through the glass to see inside. There definitely were a lot of zombies ambling around inside. He swept it from one wall to the other, a slow pan to see if there was anything that might be worth the risk.

When the beam glided across the bar area itself, Coby called out to the others. "Uh… I don't know if this means anything, but… I can see behind the bar from here, and it looks like it's pretty well stocked…"

"How well stocked?" Robin asked as plainly as she could, trying to suppress the hope that…

"I mean the shelves look pretty full. I don't know much about alcohol, but there are a LOT of intact bottles up there."

… The hope that they had hit gold. A bar, somehow ignored or passed over. Perhaps the warning sign was enough to keep people from looking further. Maybe they decided the prize wasn't worth the risk. Maybe no one had been to this town in quite some time.

Whatever the reason, they were currently standing in front of a pirate treasure chest just waiting to be cracked open. Alcohol, good alcohol, was hard to come by in the post-Zombie Day world. And let's face it, this was a group who had been through enough shit that they could all use a stiff drink.

The other four stepped closer to look through the window themselves, Coby pointing out the bar to them, and then pointing the beam toward the clutter of undead. "That's the only problem right there."

"Are you nuts?! There has to be at least… Thirty or forty zombies in there!" Vivi shouted. "Not to mention the-" a crash came from far behind them, the five whirled around to see a zombie across the street who had just tripped over a trash can. Vivi immediately hushed her voice. "Not to mention the free ones lurking about!"

"We won't have to clear out the whole town! We just need to clean up this area around here! It's easy! There's barely anything even around, anyway! I could do that by myself!" Luffy said, stating the truth but still making it sound like gloating.

"Not everyone is like you, sweetie," Nami said, patting Luffy on the shoulder. "But still. A haul like that. I mean, even considering what we don't drink, the rest we can bring with us, make for good trade…"

Robin nodded along with her. "In this day and age, an untapped bar is gold. We just have to plan our attack."

"Why are you just assuming we're going to go for this?! Look, this is way too risky, we have no guarantee this will even work! For- for alcohol?! Not even medicine or food or someone's life!" Vivi whisper-shouted, already walking away from the bar.

Coby shook his head. "I'm with her, this is not worth trying to kill a zillion zombies."

"You two have never been drunk, have you?" Nami asked rhetorically. Of course she knew they hadn't, they were the good kids, the ones who still wore nice sweaters at the end of the world. Because appearance was important.

"Come on, we gotta do this! I've never been drunk with friends before! I only got drunk by myself, and that wasn't fun, it was mostly sad and I wanted to cry a lot," Luffy started that off with some decent energy, and then by the end it sort of petered off. Nami gave his shoulder a reassuring, yet silent squeeze.

Robin had stopped Vivi from walking back to the van by grabbing the back of her sweater. "This will be good for you. It'll be an experience. Goodness knows you could take the boost to your score it would give you," she said with an ironic smirk.

Vivi's shoulders slumped. She didn't turn around to face the others. "I just think this is a fantastic way for one or all of us to get killed."

"No one's gonna get killed! It wouldn't be fun getting smashed if we didn't all make it through!" Luffy was grinning at the back of Vivi's head.

"Look, Vivi. Two things. First off, we're gonna be smart about this. I know, last time we planned something… Didn't turn out great. But that was then. And this is now." Nami said.

"And alcohol is on the line," Luffy added.

"Right. And we can deal with zombies, they're easier to trick than humans. And the second thing? I know how to make really good drinks, like for babies like you. My mom taught me how to make them when I was your age, you'll totally like them."

"I'm- I'm not- I'm seventeen," Vivi stammered under her breath. "You're not that much older than me."

Nami gave her a condescending pat on the head. "Come on, back to the van, we're gonna hash this all out!"

Despite Vivi's complaints, they were much more well-stocked than they had been in a long time. Back at the apartment, they may have taken just a slight bit more gear than they came in with. For instance, Nami may have picked up a better knife than the one she first had. Maybe, just maybe, they took an extra handgun. Or two. And of course handguns needed more bullets. Not that this was proof that they took anything.

No one at the apartment would miss it, because no one could really say for sure that anyone stole anything. And even if they did, hypothetically, what were they going to do? Chase after the five of them in a frenzy to recover their missing gear? Would Crocodile gather the troops and give chase, screaming down the highways in a battalion of cars, armed with chains and pipes and spikes on the wheels?

For the first few days out of Atlanta, our group kept a close eye on their rearview mirrors.

As far as planning went, they would dispose of everything in the nearby area first, so they could take care of the bar in a single frontal assault.

They pulled the van up in front of the bar, just in case things got too hot. Robin pressed her hand on the horn, letting the sound blare through the deserted streets. Slowly, the dead emerged from alleys and half-open doors. Not nearly as many as they were expecting, actually, around fifteen stumbled their way towards the group, like college students on the way to a 6 am final exam.

They would have just opened fire on the ghouls and be done with it, except Luffy literally could not aim a gun to save his life. As such, he took point, walking up to the zombie closest to him and winding up a swing. The bat caught the zombie right in the open mouth, the force tearing everything above the jaw straight off the rest of the body. The top of its head went flying and the only way it could have been better is if the head smacked into another zombie.

Luffy being up close forced the other four to move out of "shooting range" distance and get close to the dead to the point where it was uncomfortable. They had to be conservative with their shots, and while most people would be slightly hesitant with their movements, Luffy had enough blind trust in his friends that he had no fear of friendly fire.

The gunshots that echoed through the streets coaxed out a few more from wherever they were hiding. It was more of a nuisance to deal with these ones, a small number, scattered groups, in an open area. They practically lined themselves up to go down. The most annoying part is that every time they thought they were done, one or two more emerged from somewhere. They would be shot before they could even get close and then the five would wait. Three times, they felt they could lower their guard when another came growling at them.

They waited silently for five minutes, with no activity, before Robin officially declared the all clear.

Even then, they waited another few minutes. "Yeah. All clear. We're good," Coby confirmed.

Round two was dealing with the contents of the bar. They had the advantage of forcing the zombies to move in one direct path through the door, funneling them directly into firing range. Even Luffy was bound to hit some of them that way. The disadvantage is that if they couldn't keep the pressure on, it was very easy to get overwhelmed by a big cluster of 30 some-odd zombies.

The gunfire had gotten them all riled up. The five could see them clawing at the windows, snapping rotting jaws pressed against the glass. They were pounding at the door, causing the chain wrapped around the handles to jingle.

The van was to their backs, a good five yards away. Their plan was, should things go awry, they take a step back. And if they hit the van, then they pile in and drive a distance away. Even with a safety net like that, their hearts were still racing. They aimed their guns at the door, Luffy's aim wavering, prompting Nami to tell him to hold it steady dammit.

With a deep breath, Robin stepped forward and aimed at the lock around the chain. She blew it open and yanked the now loose chain from the door handles, stumbling back and almost tripping as the doors swung open and the undead came pouring out.

Robin scrambled back to her position, out of the way of potential gunfire and once she was clear, the other four immediately opened fire. The snarling, ragged groans were muffled by the crack of bullets leaving the chamber, the splatter of blood and brains on hard concrete. The zombies in the back stumbled and fell over the limp corpses of their fallen comrades. Of course, this didn't stop them or anything. They were still able to crawl along the ground, moving ever closer.

The group was forced back a yard or so, but they ran the count from 30+ down to about ten. And those ten were stuck crawling on the ground because zombies are too stupid to figure out how to stand up quickly. Rather than spend the bullets, Luffy headed to the van to retrieve the hockey bag full of melee weapons they had snuck out of Crocodile's apartment.

"Okay who wants the machete?" He called out, pulling it from the bag and waving it above his head.

"Dibs," Robin said, taking it from him and giving it a few practice swings to test the weight.

"And Nami, you still got your knife?"

Nami confirmed it by attempting to spin it in her hand and subsequently dropping it, jumping away before it could stab her toe, and picking it back up. "Yeah. I got it."

"Awesome! Aaaand hammer! Who wants a hammer?"

Coby raised his hand, taking the claw hammer from Luffy. He thought a bit about which side would be more effective to swing into someone's skull with, and then realized how disturbing a thought that was.

"Alright, Vivi, you want this hatchet? Or do you want the police baton thingie?"

"Uh, neither, actually." She sunk inward a little bit, looking at the ground. "I don't want to get blood on this blouse, I like it."

Nami and Robin rolled their eyes at her, and the boys gave her a confused, yet hesitantly accepting look. The look of a parent whose young child has just covered their dog in non-toxic paint because they said the dog wanted to feel pretty.

So the four of them, minus Vivi, disposed of the remaining grounded zombies and stood in the bar's entrance. The interior was one straight, long path to the end where a pair of kitchen doors hung. Along the right wall was the bar itself, the shelves behind it stacked with bottles. The barstools had been knocked over and sent askew by the zombies that previously not-lived there. Along the left wall were the typical collection of pool tables and dart boards.

The five skulked in, shining flashlights into the darkness, confirming it was indeed empty. Once they were inside, Coby and Robin pulled the doors shut and Robin wrapped the chain around the inside door handles, tying it in as close to a knot as she could.

Luffy made a beeline to the kitchen doors, pointing them out to the others. "Check it out! This was a bar restaurant thing! I wonder if they got any canned-" WHACK. The door suddenly swung open, crashing into Luffy and sending him flat on his ass. The culprit was a zombie, with others clamoring behind her.

Luffy shook it off and looked up at his attacker. "Oh hey! Do waitresses count as uniforms?! Is she ten points?!"

"No, waitresses don't count! Now get the hell back here!" Nami shrieked, readying her knife.

Luffy scrambled to his feet, taking a swing with his bat to smash the waitress-zombie's head in. He backed away from the door, letting the other undead freaks pile out. Likewise, the other four living ones moved in closer.

"Why doesn't it end?!" Vivi groaned, as more and more seemed to appear out of nowhere. It sincerely looked like there wasn't enough room for every zombie to hide in that kitchen. For every one they killed, another seemed to stumble out.

Coby swung the hammer down, catching one in the eye socket and had to twist it around in order to pull it back out. He stumbled back as another lunged for him, and he was able to hold it away from his vulnerable, vulnerable neck until Nami could stab it in the back of the head and help him throw it to the side.

Luffy, of course, was having a blast, shouting out his new score every time the bat smashed in another skull. "78! 79! 8- Aw come on, Robin, don't kill-steal!" he whined when the machete blade cleanly cleaved a skull cap off of the zombie in front of him.

Vivi had been doing so well, putting just enough distance between her and the dead so that her bullets didn't splatter guts all over her. Right up until the very last one. It lunged at her, throwing its entire weight on top of her and before she could fall backwards and smash the back of her head open on the bar, she jammed the pistol into its mouth and pulled the trigger, splattering her with brains and blood.

"Uuuoooaaaaaggghh!" she groaned, shoving the limp creature away. "God, this is so gross… I really liked this shirt, you know!"

"You should never get too attached to clothes, Vivi," Nami said with a shrug and a sympathetic smile.

"I know, but still. Ugh."

Robin sat on one of the barstools, surveying the decent pile of corpses in front of the kitchen door. "Alright. Let's take these things out and then… Let's all get drunk."

The following rest of the chapter will be automatically translated from drunken slurring. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to read it.

After tossing all the corpses outside and making a halfhearted attempt to clean and straighten the bar, they indeed set to work getting smashed. With the sun down, they drank by flashlight, drowning out the occasional moan or gurgle from outside with loud laughter.

"So he's talking about how badass he is, how he and his group survived out there on foot for years, like really trying to impress her, you know?" Nami was saying, sitting on a pool table and swinging her feet. "Like he had this speech prepared and he ends it with this... Okay it was actually a pretty cool line about like sacrificing your morality for the good of others or something. And he just ends it and waits for my mom to be all stunned by it. And she just goes, like, '... Cool. So I'm gonna put you on scavenge runs and we'll get you set up with a house and shit', just completely sandbags his whole shit. The guy was completely stunned!"

The others burst into laughter, Vivi having to lean on Coby to keep from falling off the couch they had pulled up to sit on.

"Your mother is incredible," Robin said, covering her mouth with her hand to hide her laughter. "I cannot wait to see her again," she finished off her drink, red wine in a bar glass because all the wine glasses had shattered when the drawer they were on collapsed at some point over the years. She refilled her glass, saying "Is she seeing anyone at all?"

"Are you interested in my mom?" Nami asked with apprehension.

Robin gave a nonchalant shrug, "Maybe I am. She's attractive, she's charismatic, supportive-"

"Okay okay, no! No do not date my mom when we get back, that would be... Impossibly weird." Nami held up her hand to stop Robin from saying anything else.

"I would like to see you stop me," Robin said.

Nami rolled her eyes and muttered into her glass, "Now you're gonna date her out of spite, aren't you?"

"How much further is it to Boston, anyway?" Coby asked. "I'm excited to get there too!"

Nami shrugged. "It depends on roadblocks and shit, but shouldn't be more than like, two weeks maybe? We're not far out."

Coby and Vivi both broke into giddy laughter, grabbing each others' hands and bouncing on the couch. "Oh my gosh! Just a few weeks and we'll have a house and a community… We'll have a place to raise the baby~" Vivi sighed dreamily.

At hearing the word "baby", the girls screamed "WHAT?!" and Luffy immediately sprang up to grab the drink out of Vivi's hand.

"You're pregnant?! What the hell?! You shouldn't be drinking, holy shit!" Nami shrieked, her voice cracking.

Vivi made grabby hands at her drink, Luffy held it above his head to keep it away from her. "No, no! Hypothetical baby! I'm not pregnant! But we want kids, I swear! We're always really safe, I promise!" She suddenly slapped her hands over her mouth, as though she admitted some terrible secret. Luffy just looked confused, but the girls were unfazed.

"You don't have to hide it, we all know you two are having sex." Robin said flatly.

"Wh-what?!" Vivi and Coby squeaked.

"Wait they're what?" Luffy asked.

"They're doing it. Haven't you wondered why we don't all sleep in the van anymore?" Nami asked. "Why we always find some house or something, so we get separate rooms?"

"Is that-!? Is that what those sounds are?! That's what it is?!" Luffy seemed genuinely shocked by this turn of events. Coby and Vivi both had faces about as pink as Coby's hair, trying to curl up into an infinitely small ball.

"Yes, Luffy, that is what sex sounds like."

"Good sex at that, from what we can hear," Robin added.

"Okay! Shut up about this! This part of the conversation is over!" Vivi shouted, finally reaching up to take her drink back from Luffy.

He just laughed at the two of them. "Well hey, good for you two I guess!" At that, he excused himself to the bathroom, chuckling all the way to the back of the bar.

Vivi, biting her lower lip, pointed her finger accusingly at Nami. "And what about you two, huh?! I'll bet you're doing it too!"

"Doing what? With who?" Nami said.

"With Luffy! You two are all over each other during the day, you don't get to make fun of us!" Coby accused.

Nami burst out into laughter, eyebrows high with incredulousness. "Are you serious?! You think-?! Kids, if I was getting laid, I would be telling everyone at every opportunity!"

"Oh! Sorry, we just assumed you and Luffy were…" Vivi trailed off.

Nami shook her head, waving her hands. "What?! No! No, no, Luffy and I aren't even- We're not- like, together!"

Even Robin seemed surprised at this. "You aren't? But you two sleep together at every opportunity."

"And plus you really are all over each other. He follows you around like a puppy!" Coby followed up.

"It's really cute…" Vivi whispered.

Nami leaned back until she was laying flat on the pool table, legs dangling off the edge. "I mean don't get me wrong, I would totally be down for that. But he hasn't like, made a move or anything."

"Wait, so you want us to be a thing?" Luffy's voice came from the side of the pool table, just out of Nami's line of sight.

"YES, oh my God. You're hot and fun and you kick ass at beating shit up. Who wouldn't want that?"

It took a good thirty seconds for Nami's alcohol-soaked brain to register the things that were said to her and she responded with. When the mouse finally reached the cheese, she sat up like a shot. "W-WAIT, I MEAN-! SHIT-!"

Luffy was right in front of her now, grinning his signature mischievous smile. "That's so cool! I wanna be a thing too, I just didn't know how to say it!"

There were a number of ways Nami could back out of this situation. She could abruptly pass out. She could blame what she was saying on the alcohol and claim she didn't mean it. She could grab her knife and kill everyone and then herself. Yes. That would be the best bet. Murder is always the correct answer.

All panicked thoughts immediately vanished when Luffy suddenly asked "You wanna make out?"

"Yes" somehow escaped from her lips and the next thing Nami knew, Luffy's arms were around her waist and his lips were against hers.

Now, if this were a romance story, this would be the part where I tell you how their tongues battled for dominance, how their hands moved up and down, grabbing at all the right places, how they giggled softly against each other.

But this is not a romance story. This is a story about incredibly lucky people. So, yes, Nami's legs eventually wrapped around Luffy's waist, and while they felt their kiss was the heated passion worthy of the silver screen, in reality it was a sloppy mess of alcohol-laden breath, teeth hitting against teeth, lip and tongue biting, but not in the sexy intentional way, and hands gripping at clothes more for support than anything else.

But even with the other three cheering like a studio audience in a sitcom, it felt nice. Both of them felt nice kissing each other, and that was the most important part of the whole thing, damn it.


	9. Chapter 9

Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance

Chapter 9

Waking up with a killer hangover, on a surface that is not a bed, laying on the chest of a hot dude. Oh yes, Nami was very familiar with this particular situation. It had happened to her more times than she could count. A different boy every night, that was her.

This is sarcasm, in case it's not clear. I know sarcasm is hard to pick up on via text sometimes.

Nami did in fact wake up in Luffy's arms, using his chest as a pillow. He was still completely zoned out, laying on his back, on the pool table. Apparently they had passed out there at some point in the evening.

She managed to lift herself up, out of Luffy's grip and he stayed passed out. Rolling over to sit up, she could survey the rest of the bar. Coby and Vivi were curled up against each other, the perfect little dream couple sound asleep. And Robin was at the bar, leaning on her elbows with her head down.

"Hey. Morning," Nami called out. Robin's head shot up like she was caught sleeping at her cubicle.

"O-oh, morning," she choked out. "I can't believe I didn't drink any water all night. I'm the responsible adult."

Nami slid off the pool table, giving one more glance back at Luffy before moving up to the bar. Robin tossed her a bottle of water. "I dunno, we all got excited. Hardly your fault. At least you didn't do anything dumb."

"Like make out with the only available boy you know?" Robin said with a smirk.

Nami sipped at her water bottle. "That was real, huh?"

"You two went at it a few times through the night actually."

"That's not funny," Nami said.

Robin shrugged, "I wasn't joking. I don't remember much, but I do remember you and him going back for seconds at least." She studied Nami's face, seeing the stern, squinting expression of a girl trying to use her brain while it was busy screaming in agony. "You don't look happy with this outcome."

Nami exhaled as loud as possible. "Yeah, well..." She trailed off at that, letting her non-response mean whatever Robin wanted it to mean.

The two of them almost missed Coby and Vivi shuffling past. They were very clearly in a hurry to get to the bathroom, Vivi with her hand over her mouth. Robin called out "Hang in there, always darkest before dawn," in the most encouraging voice she could muster.

"Heh. Morning sickness," Nami muttered. Robin covered her mouth again, trying to stifle her laughter because she knew laughing would aggravate her head even worse.

When Vivi returned from the bathroom, she simply collapsed onto the couch and made it clear that she was in no mood to do anything. This honestly suited everyone else just fine. They were in no condition to hit the road, and they didn't want to leave just yet anyway. Coby busied himself tending to Vivi, despite his own horrible hangover. Robin looked behind the bar for any canned goods. If they were going to stay here, they'd need to eat something and she would rather they not have to venture outside to get supplies from the van.

Luffy, the miracle child he was, somehow slept through all of this. Nami took a seat next to him on the pool table and gently poked at his side. He didn't stir. She laid down next to him, staring up at the ceiling. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that he was using her sweatshirt as a pillow.

"There's nothing in here besides alcohol, and I think we've had enough of that," Robin finally muttered, leaning on the bar for support. "We're going to need to get to the van."

After Coby draped his jacket over Vivi, he stood up. "Would you mind backing me up? I don't want to do this alone…" They had heard the undead moaning last night and had a feeling there were still a few zombies outside. Peering through the barricaded windows proved there were just two clawing helplessly at the door.

Robin unwrapped the chain around the doors, and on the count of three, she shoved them open, knocking both zombies flat on their asses. Two quick stabs with kitchen knives disposed of them, and the brightness of the morning sun combined with the quick movements sent both Robin and Coby into a dizzying state.

Robin grabbed at her knees, waiting for the world to stop spinning. Coby, she could hear, let out a string of expletives that even she dare not repeat. Nor was she fully aware of some of their meanings.

With the silence inside, Nami was able to start forming coherent thoughts in her mind. She wasn't exactly displeased with last night's turn of events. What concerned her most was actually how well it went. While not terrible, Nami's life had been plagued with things not going according to plan. The motel, the CDC, those were just two more marks on the "Well, that's that I guess" tally she had been keeping since she was twelve. With a person like Luffy, there were so many ways things could go wrong between them. And while she could prepare herself for disappointment, it's still not a fun thing to do.

Nami's thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the sounds of horns and gunshots.

Robin and Coby dug through the duffel bags containing canned and freeze-dried goods. Nothing, of course, looked particularly appetizing. "We don't happen to have tomato juice, so we?" Robin asked.

"No, I don't think so," Coby responded. "Why do you ask?"

"Bloody Marys would be perfect right now..." She muttered.

"I don't think more alcohol is the solution here," Coby said. Before Robin could respond, she was interrupted by the sound of horns and gunshots.

They weren't car horns, mind you. They were horns. Trumpets. Sounding off as if they were presenting royalty.

And they were, in a sense. Down the street, Coby and Robin could see what looked like a shitty parade coming toward them. A shitty parade with shittier observers trying in vain to devour them.

In lieu of floats, the parade consisted of decorated cars, vans, and pickup trucks. Each had been spray painted with a similar pattern, a skull surrounded by ten snake heads in a fan-like pattern. It greatly resembled a pirate's skull and crossbones. The gunshots they heard earlier came from the armed men and women who were on foot, walking alongside the vehicles and keeping the zombies at bay. The trumpets were apparently meant to announce the parade's presence, to draw the undead out.

"What… the heck is that…?" Coby asked, peering into the distance as the parade/convoy drew closer.

Upon hearing the gunshots, Nami sat up. She couldn't see Luffy's eyes snap open and he similarly shot up like a whip. His eyes darted around the room, right up until the headache and nausea kicked in, causing him to lean forward, clutching his head. "Wh-what the hell…? People're tryin' to sleep…"

Vivi just covered her ears with her arms, which was fine. If there was some shit going on, she was in no condition to help. Luffy and Nami slid off the pool table, heading for the door to bear witness to an incredible spectacle.

The procession consisted of about 20 cars total, a huge group of people, many wearing what could be considered outlandish at best and completely absurd at worst. In the center of the procession was a pickup truck emblazoned with the pirate emblem on either side, and the hood as well. In the bed of the truck was a tent, the kind one would find royalty sitting under when they traveled on their chariots or whatever. It was covered, preventing the four of them from seeing whoever was inside.

The entire procession seemed to be held up by the group's van, parked in the middle of the street. Robin and Coby were trying to explain that they were perfectly willing to move it out of the way and they really did not see what the issue was.

One of the goons out on foot was telling them that the issue was not the blockade their van created. It was the fact that the town they had stopped in was meant for their empress' control. "Our glorious empress traveled here personally to stake her claim. Now we arrive to find outsiders interfering with that?"

Robin and Coby looked to each other, and then back to Luffy and Nami, who both shrugged.

"We're just passing through, we aren't staying or anything. If you want this town for your..." Robin looked to the tent-truck. "Empress. Then you can have it."

The goon shook his head, staring behind them at the open bar doors. "When our scouts found this place, the bar's alcohol stash was its main appeal. And yet here we find it wide open, and from the smell of your breath, you've taken a fair share."

The four of them looked away sheepishly. The goon continued. "Where are you from? Everyone along the east coast should know this town was marked by our empress. Coming here is a massive sign of disrespect."

Marked, staking claim, all this talk of territory, Bellemere wasn't the only one who set up a society along the east coast. With access to water and good weather, lots of towns had developed over the years. While Bellemere wasn't interested in expanding unless necessary to accommodate more people, other, more ambitious leaders sought to reclaim abandoned towns to expand their territory. Whoever this empress was, she wanted this little town and the booze it carried with it.

"Look, we've been traveling for a few months, but we'll give you everything we didn't drink, no issue. Sorry for the mixup," Nami said, trying to defuse the situation.

"Mixup?! This is no mere mixup!" The voice that said this came from inside the tent, and the goon they had been talking to suddenly shot up at attention.

"PRESENTING HER MAJESTY, EMPRESS BOA HANCOCK!"

The woman emerged from her tent, revealing herself as tall and gorgeous, with the kind of posture that made her seem like she was towering over you no matter what your height was. She was dressed like some kind of Amazonian goddess, gold jewelry on her neck and wrists. Her long black hair shone in the morning sun, and the only one who was not stunned was Nami.

"Oh no... Not you..." She muttered.

Hancock was a Drama Kid. In fact, she was THE Drama Kid. Drama Kids are the end result of a zombie apocalypse that takes place in an age where media consumption dictates everything. Every nerd with a replica katana thinks they have what it takes to survive when society collapses and more often than not, they are absolutely wrong.

But, after Zombie Day, there were a few who actually had the chops to make it. Hancock was one of them. Hancock had a knack for leadership, and survival skills to make her a vital asset to anyone looking to make it. She also had a closet full of cosplay outfits and a few weeks into the post-Zombie Day world, the realization that conventions were a thing of the past finally hit her.

That will not do, she decided, and since there was no society left, there was nothing stopping her from dressing up like it was normal. Because when people depend on you to lead them and ensure their continued existence, they forego the right to make fun of you for dressing like a Naruto character.

She wasn't the only one, of course. The venn diagram overlap of survivor badasses and anime nerds is pretty slim, but it still exists. These people spread their gospel of kicking ass and looking ridiculous, to the point where those outside the nerd circle started calling them "Drama Kids". It was a much nicer name than what was originally tossed around, which was "Stupid-ass anime jackasses".

Hancock, like Bellemere, led a community of survivors. Unlike Bellemere, she was stationed in Washington DC and her group was comprised primarily of Drama Kids. Before Zombie Day, Hancock had wanted to become president. When she learned that the White House had fallen to the undead, she made it a point to claim it for her own. Then she decided she didn't want to be president. She wanted to be empress.

If Hancock had declared she would be taking this town for herself, well… It was no wonder the place was devoid of people. No one would be stupid enough to steal right from under her nose.

Nami raised her hands in surrender, showing she meant no ill will. "Look, Empress Hancock. We're sorry for coming into your territory, sorry about drinking booze you had a claim on. Didn't mean any disrespect. I'm Bellemere's daughter, she runs Funkytown up north in Boston? Send some of your men up there and we'll replace the alcohol. We can all just walk away clean, right?"

Hancock sneered down at this lowly ginger rat who dared speak so plainly to her. "We will do no such thing. Ignorance is no excuse for thievery! And you think saying you're the daughter of a leader makes you less guilty? You of all people should know better! I should raze your town to the ground for this affront."

Nami knew this wasn't an idle threat, "Whoa whoa whoa, hold on! That is not necessary, we can totally work something out!"

"We can work out how I'm gonna put my fist in her face!" Luffy shouted, stepping forward. He pounded his fist into his open palm. "You and me, Hamhock! Let's go right now!"

That caused the guns to come out. Hancock didn't even need to give the order, just a snap of metal and then ten assault rifles were pointed at the four of them. Nami threw her arms around Luffy to pull him back.

"Are we doing this?" Robin asked, reaching for her knife.

"I really don't want to do this!" Coby cried, reaching for his own.

Hancock's voice carried through everyone with the weight of a thousand ancient conquerors, with power that almost felt like a physical force. "STAND. DOWN."

Guns immediately lowered without question, leaving the four to stand awkwardly in some kind of attack formation. Hancock stepped down from her throne, walking off the truck bed to stand in front of them. All of them but Luffy felt like a 90 year old grandma standing before an angry Muhammed Ali. Luffy just thought that this put Hancock in prime punchin' distance.

"You. Cute boy. What is your name?" She asked.

"Uh, Coby, ma'am-"

"Not you! Him!" She snapped.

Luffy glared at her. "I'm Luffy." Nami was still noticeably struggling to hold him back.

"I've received threats, declarations of war, but you... You are the first person brave enough to challenge me to a fistfight."

"And I'll win! Even if there are three of you floating around!" Luffy's eyes weren't quite focused. Like he wasn't quite sure where Hancock was.

She just nodded, contemplative. "I like that attitude. You show courage and strength. On top of that, you are incredibly good looking."

Luffy, with his wrinkled clothes, messy hair, and glazed eyes, tensed up.

"I will take you with my convoy, you will serve at my side," she waved her hand dismissively. "And the rest of you can work as my slaves to make up for what you've done."

"WHOA NO OKAY!" Nami shouted, pulling Luffy back when he tried to lunge for Hancock. "That is also not alright!"

"You can't make us slaves and also take Luffy away from us," Robin said. "One or the other, but both is far too severe."

Coby stared at her like she was crazy. "No! Neither of them are okay!" He shrieked, his voice getting higher pitched.

At the sign of resistance, the guns snapped up again and everyone shut up.

"This is what I have decreed, and it shall be done," Hancock said plainly with all that authority from earlier. She reached for Luffy's collar, trying to yank him from Nami's grip.

Before things could devolve to a human tug of war competition, a voice called out "Parley!"

The four, as well as Hancock and her soldiers, turned to the source, standing in the bar doors.

Vivi was standing there, imitating all the conquering valor that Hancock displayed. Well, as much as a hungover 17 year old could muster. She strode forth, towards the group, only stumbling a little bit, but carrying her own authority nonetheless.

"What did you say?" Hancock asked when Vivi was in front of her.

"Parley. Two opposing parties will cease all hostilities and instead negotiate terms until they have reached a peaceful agreement," Vivi responded.

Hancock shook her head. "I damn well know what parley means. What makes you think I would follow it, though?"

Vivi looked over Hancock's shoulder. At the skulls painted on the side of every car in the envoy. "Well, you're pirates, aren't you?"

Hancock looked shocked, but in a way that someone whose birthday had been forgotten about for five years had suddenly received a birthday cake at their office desk. "You are correct," she said, trying to contain her surprise. "Very well, in honor of our pirates' code, I shall give you the benefit of hearing out your offer. But I do not guarantee I will accept it."

"That's fine. I'm sure we can come to terms here," Vivi said. She had to lean on her husband for support, but her eyes never left Hancock's.

The others were boggled at her. Even Coby seemed surprised by this turn of events, he didn't expect his wife to suddenly bust out her negotiation skills.

Hancock whirled around to face her troops. "Seize the other three! Take them to the prisoner transports while we are in talks!"

When someone came to take Nami away, it was Luffy's turn to latch onto her. She had to assure him she would be okay, even if she herself didn't believe it. They were depending on Vivi's ability to negotiate at this point, and none of them save Coby had any idea if she was any good.

Luffy and Vivi were escorted away with Hancock, leaving the other three to be dragged to the back of the convoy. A bunch of cop cars had been redesigned to bear Hancock's symbol, and the three were unceremoniously shoved into them. Separated and unable to see or communicate with each other.

Each of them were accompanied by a guard, sitting in the front seat. Nami, well familiar with the back of a cop car, laid across the back seat and put her feet on the window. "This is so messed up..." She groaned to the guard.

Her guard was a middle aged man in full clown regalia. A striped shirt, funny hat, blue hair and a big red nose. Despite the attire, he didn't really give off the happy cheerful vibe one would expect of a clown. He also didn't give off the creepy serial killer ghoul one would expect of a clown.

Not getting a response, Nami continued. "Not just running into Hancock here, this whole trip has been a... A trip. But like a drug trip, y'know?"

The clown grumbled a huff of a response.

"That guy Luffy? The one Hancock's into? Yeah he and I made out last night. We were drunk but still. I dunno, I'm kind of into him. Maybe a lot into him."

Still nothing from Bozo.

"It's like... Okay the pink and blue haired ones? They're teenagers and they're already talking about marriage and white picket fences and kids and I'm over here back to looking up at a cop car roof. With a hangover."

"Can you please be quiet?" There was venom in the clown's voice. He was gripping the steering wheel so tight his knuckles may have been white. Not that anyone could tell with the gloves on his hands.

Nami was silent for maybe a minute before she continued talking. "He's like this weird hermit guy, you know? He lived in New York for like four years. New York! So he's a total badass and shit. Like you can't deny that is pretty hot. But like, mentally he's still fifteen. Is that weird? Is that okay to go out with him? God, would you mind if I smoked in here?"

The clown's teeth started to grind.

"I'm gonna go ahead and smoke. Roll down the window or something," Nami said as she pulled her lighter and cigarettes out. She lit one and paused to take a drag on it. The clown begrudgingly rolled the window down, but not nearly far enough that she could open the door. He wasn't an idiot. "I can't imagine him not being into me. I mean look at me. I slept on a frickin' pool table and I still look hot as sin. But he's an idiot, so I'm not sure he even knows how to romance someone. The idea of teaching him how to be a good boyfriend is kind of cute and I do like manipulating guys into doing my bidding. But on the other hand, it does seem kind of twisted if this is going to be a long-term thing."

"Please. Please for God's sake shut up. Stop talking."

"Maybe I'm thinking too hard about this," she was waving the cigarette around, talking with her hands. "Maybe we date for a little while and then it doesn't work out and it's just a fling. That happens. No one says we have to be true love, right? But then on the other hand, we'll be living in the same community and it isn't that big. We'll definitely keep running into each other and that level of awkwardness is unbearable."

"I cannot believe you continue to talk! After everything I've said!"

There was another long drag on her cigarette. "I guess I don't have to rush things. I can feel it out a little more? I mean, my mom never got married, and my sister's been single for years. I guess I won't feel the pressure until they do it. You know what I mean? Like they're older than me and they haven't done it, so I guess I have time? Shit. Did girls my age have these kinds of problems before Zombie Day?"

"WHY THE HELL ARE YOU ASKING ME?! DO I LOOK LIKE I KNOW WHAT PROBLEMS GIRLS HAVE?!"

"... Granted, now that I think about it, this is all assuming Vivi can get us off the hook. Hm. I'm really not cut out for slavery. Just saying ahead of time. I don't really like taking orders and not getting compensation for them." She flicked the cigarette butt out the open window and sat up, leaning forward. "Hey, answer a question for me. Clowns are worth one point, right?"

"ARE YOU THREATENING ME OR SOMETHING?!"

"What? No, I'm just asking because a friend and I are in a debate about it."

The clown groaned like a suffering animal, burying his face in his hands. "Clowns are worth one point," he spat.

"Ugh, thank you! That's what I've been saying! No offense or anything," she quickly added.

There was a long, awkward silence. Nami, having exhausted her wandering thoughts, decided to try to annoy her keeper by leaning back and quietly humming random tunes. The clown had seemed to give up on protesting at this point.

"If your friend somehow convinces Empress Hancock to let you all go... You should ask him out," he said finally.

Nami sat up, a smile spreading across her face. "You think so?!"

Clearly begrudging the act of actually giving advice, the clown muttered "If you don't go for it, then you'll never know. Or something."

"Well, thank you!" Nami cheered. "That really means a lot! I was just trying to annoy you, but I really appreciate that!"

"I am aware," the clown said through gritted teeth. "Now please be quiet."

When the three were called back to the bar to hear the final verdict, they were greeted by Hancock, standing in the bar entrance with Luffy and Vivi standing at either side of her. Vivi looked like she had been hit by a train and Luffy had the confused look of a dog that had just been shown a magic trick.

Upon seeing Nami, Luffy wandered to her in a daze and she found her arms opening up to receive him in a hug. She nearly buckled under his weight when he went limp in her arms, but she managed to keep both of them upright. "So... How did things go...?" She asked him, afraid his stunned state was a result of bad negotiations.

"I dunno. There was a lot of talking and I couldn't keep up... It was crazy... Politics are so weird, how did we do it back then?" He muttered. So Luffy was just confused. Not necessarily scared. That was... Acceptable.

"Well, there's good news and bad news," Vivi said, pulling at her ponytail out of nervousness. "Well, I guess most of it is neutral news..."

There was an awkward silence that felt like it lasted a millennia. "Well?" Coby asked as sweetly as he could muster. God forbid he not be the picture of adorableness around her.

"So I managed to talk Miss Hancock out of enslaving us... In exchange for some alcohol compensation when we get to Boston. Oh! Miss Hancock's caravan is accompanying us to Boston," she added quickly, looking at Nami with an apologetic smile.

"Oh. Good..." Nami muttered. "Shouldn't be a problem..."

"That's the good news. And part of the bad news. The worse news-"

"There's worse news now?!" Coby exclaimed.

"The worse news is she still wants Luffy as her, uh..." She looked to Hancock to fill in the blank.

Hancock was staring longingly at Luffy. "Oh... Whatever I wish him to be at the time."

Nami clung to Luffy a little tighter. He did likewise.

"But... She's willing to compromise in exchange for something Nami's mother can provide in equal value."

"Equal value?" Nami repeated.

"What can your community supply to mine? What product can you give, that would equal as fine a specimen as that boy there?" Hancock clarified.

Nami winced as if she were in pain. Funkytown was not a big place. It didn't provide much in the way of unique goods, she thought. "Uhhhh... We have... A bullet press? We can make ammunition?"

Hancock didn't seem too impressed. Nami could feel Vivi's eyes on her. As well as Coby's, Robin's and especially Luffy's, considering he was inches away from her face. "Fresh fruits and veggies? Uh. Oh! We've got a port so we have fish?"

Hancock shook her head. "We already have a port. Can you really offer nothing?"

Nami was floundering, and as the stammering started anew, she could have sworn Luffy had reached down to grab her butt. But that was impossible, as Luffy's arms were draped over her shoulders and he couldn't possibly reach that far down. No, the hand on her butt belonged to Robin. And Robin wasn't grabbing her butt, she was pulling the pack of cigarettes out of her back pocket.

"Tobacco," she said plainly, holding the pack between her fingers like it was a squirming cockroach. She shot Nami a quick dirty look, the look of "I-still-remember-what-you-did-with-these".

"YES! Tobacco! Cigarettes! We have tobacco plants! Handrolled cigarettes, we can supply those!"

Hancock crossed her arms. "I don't smoke and have no intention of starting. Why would I want cigarettes?"

Robin stepped forward, pivoting on her heels to face the crowd of Hancock's soldiers standing behind Nami, Luffy, and Coby. "Who here would like a cigarette?"

The crowd exploded. Desperate, panicked cries rang out, like a swarm of damned souls crying for mercy.

"ME! ME OH GOD I WANT A CIGARETTE SO BADLY!"

"I WOULD STAB MY HUSBAND IN THE CHEST FOR A CIGARETTE!"

"I WOULD LET MY WIFE STAB ME IN THE CHEST FOR A CIGARETTE!"

Robin looked back at Hancock. The pirate empress was nodding her head slowly. "You have made your point."

Vivi looked to Hancock with hope in her eyes. "S-so… So that means…?"

The older woman nodded. "I will tentatively accept your terms. If your community's leader will not trade, however, then I shall take what is mine."

Just as the five of them started to breathe sighs of relief, Hancock snapped back into action. "Pack up, everyone! We are leaving immediately! You five will lead us to your community! I want two cars right behind them at all times, snipers aimed for their tires in case they attempt to mislead us! I will not take chances!"

Any hope of a nice, relaxing drive back home after a hell of a journey like this was immediately dashed for all five of them. They were quickly shuffled into their van and a quick glance into the rearview mirror showed two cars immediately pulling behind them. Gunmen were standing through the sunroof, rifles aimed at their backsides.

"Mom's gonna love this…" Nami said from the passenger seat. Coby and Vivi, sitting in the middle row, sank down into their seats as low as they could. Luffy, in the far back, turned around so he could stare straight at them. Maybe his glaring would intimidate them somehow.

Nami could barely see his angry reflection in the back window. She still had things to say to him, and she doubted she would get a moment alone for a while now. Not with Hancock's goons hounding them like this… So instead she fished one of her maps out of the glove compartment and muttered directions to Robin.

Next stop, Home.


	10. Chapter 10

Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance

Chapter 10

When the city appeared in the distance, Nami let out a dramatic sigh of relief. With her luck, she had been afraid she'd come home to find the place burned down or overrun or completely deserted.

Nojiko was the first one to see them. She was back on gate duty, albeit with a new partner. In the time since Nami left to now, autumn had taken over, preventing any further lounging around in swimsuits. But this was okay for Nojiko, as it prevented her watch partner from ogling her instead of doing his job.

It was pretty hard to miss the approaching caravan, even without binoculars. She saw them approaching the gates and snapped to get her partner's attention. "Sanji. Binoculars."

He passed them to her and she peered through them. "What the hell? What is Boa Hancock doing all the way out here?"

"Empress Hancock?!" Sanji exclaimed, a mix of dread and excitement in his voice. "You're sure that's her?!"

"That's her symbol, isn't it?" Nojiko passed the binoculars back to him, and upon looking through them, he nodded.

"Wait... The car in front doesn't have... Holy shit! That's Nami in the front! Leading the pack!"

Nojiko yanked the binoculars away from Sanji, confirming this for herself. Her little sister, sitting in the passenger seat of the van out front. She recognized the black-haired woman driving, but no one else. "What the hell is going on here...? Dude, get my mom on the radio! Tell her Nami's back! And to... I dunno, prepare wine for Hancock? What do we do in this situation?"

There was a scramble to get things set up. Bellemere stood just behind the gate as it swung open to receive the town's guests. Her heart soared upon seeing her daughter safe and sound, letting the girl run forward and embrace her mother in a hug. "Oh my God, my baby's come home! You have no idea how worried I've been, literally every day!"

"I can kinda imagine..." Nami half muttered/half laughed.

"So what's with the... Parade? A celebration for the return of the conquering hero?"

Nami broke the hug, looking sheepish. "Ah. Well, look... There's a lot to go over and I'll explain everything but uh... Right now, you and Empress Hancock need to, well, negotiate a trade."

Hancock was approaching them, passing through the gate like the land was rightfully hers and all around her should be honored to breathe the same air as her. Even the normally unflappable Bellemere felt a little intimidated when Hancock stood before her. The fact that the sun was to her back, illuminating her like a divine being, didn't help.

"Uh. Hey. Empress. What brings you to our neck of the woods?"

Hancock scowled down at Bellemere. "You are Bellemere, the leader of this community?"

Bellemere nodded.

"I wish to speak to you. Your daughter and her lover shall join us."

Bellemere's eyes darted to Nami. She mouthed "lover?" and Nami frantically shook her head, waving her hands in front of her.

"It's not like that- it's- look, let's just get home and do this, I'll explain as we go."

Bellemere turned back to Hancock. "Is she in trouble or something?"

"No I'm not!"

"Yes she is."

Hancock's people began milling around the entrance, idly talking to the citizens of Funkytown. Coby, Vivi, Robin, and Luffy loitered around the gates, eyes on Nami. Hancock, pivoting on her heels, whirled around and beckoned for Luffy. "CUTE BOY! COME FORWARD!"

He walked up to them like a puppy who just heard its name, bouncing on his heels and staring between the three women with wide, curious eyes.

Bellemere leaned toward Nami, whispering through the corner of her mouth. "This your lover?"

"Yes-No! No it's not-! Ugh! Don't focus on that!"

"He's cute."

"Stop it!"

Hancock silence both of them with a wicked throat-clearing. "If you'll please take me somewhere we can have our meeting?"

Bellemere took one last look over Hancock's shoulder, at the mingling going on at the front gate. "Your troops aren't… gonna do anything, are they?"

"They have been ordered not to attack and they would rather throw themselves on a blade than defy my command."

Bellemere nodded. "You'd be my hero if I weren't actively terrified of you. Alright, let's go to my house, then."

As was to be expected, Hancock wasn't exactly impressed with Bellemere's home, but when you live in the White House, not much else can compare. She didn't say anything of course, because that would be rude. Seated at the kitchen table, both Luffy and Nami couldn't help but feel like grade schoolers who had been caught teaching swear words to other kids at recess and now had to be picked up from school by their parent. Even though he had never met Bellemere before, Luffy could feel the stern, badass, motherly aura that radiated off of her.

"Alright. Before we begin anything, I just… I want all the cards out on the table." Bellemere turned to face Nami. "When you left, you had a bunch of cultists. You came back with one cultist, Empress Hancock, and a new boyfriend. So… How was your trip, honey?"

Luffy and Nami exchanged a look. For the third time, they launched into a well-rehearsed summary of their adventure.

Outside, Nojiko weaved through the crowds, seeking out the would-be savior of humanity. Sanji was right on her heels the entire time, completely in the dark on everything that was going on.

"YO!" She called out when Robin came into view.

Robin was leaning against the wall near the gate, observing the crowd without actively participating in anything. The same went for her companions, although they were sitting on the ground.

"Raven!" Nojiko said when she and Sanji were within talking distance.

"Robin," she corrected.

"Rrrrright! Sorry. So you're back! Is Nami with you? I wanna see her!" Nojiko was already scanning the crowd.

Robin shook her head. "She had some immediate business with Hancock to take care of... I think they went to your house."

Nojiko's shoulders sunk a little. "Damn it, just missed her... Ugh, well, how'd the whole world saving thing go? You get that cure set up...?"

Robin gritted her teeth. "No... No, not exactly… That did not work out."

"Howso?" Nojiko asked, sliding up against the wall to mimic Robin.

"Your sister cost me the respect of my peers and then an incident I will never know the truth about cost me any chance at salvation."

Nojiko gave a quick glance to Sanji, who shrugged.

"That's rough."

"I'm dealing with it."

"On the plus side, her journey led her to us! And then led us to here!" The blue-haired girl chirped, suddenly standing up. "I'm Vivi, this is my husband Coby," she offered an outstretched hand for Nojiko to shake. "Do you know who we can talk to about housing? We'd like to live here."

"Uh…" Nojiko looked around at the crowds. "All… Of you?"

"Oh, no no!" Vivi waved her hands in front of her. "No, just the two of us! And Robin. But Coby and I would like our own house, if that's possible?"

"Well, in that case, I can actually set you guys up with something right now. My mom runs the place, so I have general authority to make major decisions like letting new people into our community that I've never met before, without consulting anyone else. Follow me, I'll show you what we can give you."

Nojiko led Vivi and Coby away, leaving Robin and Sanji alone. He put his hand on the wall, leaning against it with the smoothest, most heart-melting smile he could call forth. "Y'know, if you need a place to live…"

Robin gave him a quick once-over, starting from his face and scanning down to his feet. She thought for a second. "No."

He did his best to suppress the dejection and didn't let his smile falter for more than a split second. "Alright," he said, with all that same smoothness. "It was worth a shot~"

Once Luffy and Nami's reacap had ended and the negotiations actually began, Nami could understand entirely why Luffy had come out of the bar looking so dazed. Hancock was a dangerous woman, crossing her meant bad news for everyone, and yet at the same time, Bellemere couldn't just let herself become a doormat. The two of them were going at it, eyes locked on each other, neither flinching, neither showing any sign of weakness. It was a battle of "yes" "no" "yes" "no" "yes" "no" and Nami had lost track of what they were even arguing about five minutes ago. Before she lost track of everything, she tried to stress, as casually as possible, how important it was that Luffy stay in a safe, normal community instead of as Hancock's... Whatever. "No offense," she would add after every statement towards Hancock and her ruling method.

Luffy hadn't even bothered trying to keep track of the conversation. He immediately blanked out and instead kept his gaze toward Nami. In the drifting wonderland that was his mind, his thoughts bounced around, regarding his future in her town. Would they continue living together? Would he have to get his own place? What kind of work was he going to do? Were they ever going to talk about making out? We're they going to make out again? What is the appropriate time to ask someone to make out?

Bellemere was getting frustrated. Just like the cultists, her daughter had forced herself into something way over her head, and this time it was for a guy Bellemere didn't even know. In the polar opposite of Luffy's growing thoughts of togetherness with Nami, Bellemere was struck with the realization that she was getting wrapped up in payments and trading options with a warlord empress for... Some dude.

Nami slumped against Luffy's shoulder, leaning on him for support. Her eyes slowly moved up and her head tilted, allowing her eyes to meet with his. "I get that your fate kind of rests in the balance here and this is important?" she whispered softly enough that only he could hear it. "But if this ends up being the last time I ever get to see you, this is a hella disappointing way to spend it."

The mouse, finally reaching the cheese in Luffy's mind-maze, squeaked out the other question Luffy had on his mind. "Do we have to even be here?" He asked aloud, interrupting Hancock and Bellemere.

The two women stared at him, suddenly quiet.

"I'm just asking since no one's actually asked me what I wanna do or where I wanna live." He said that without a hint of sarcasm or negativity in his voice. He was just stating the facts.

Still, Nami's chest tightened. So did Hancock's and Bellemere's, but Nami's especially did. "You... You want to stay here, right?" Nami said.

"Obviously he would prefer to stay with someone as beautiful as me. That is why I have to bargain for him, after all," Hancock said, flipping her hair.

This whole time, Luffy hadn't actually made his intentions known. Nami just assumed. She was certain they all did as well. Robin, Vivi, and Coby all probably assumed Luffy would want to stay together. But, maybe he was cunning enough to know the power that could come with serving Hancock…

"Well, kid?" Bellemere asked. "What do you want to-"

"I wanna stay here with Nami."

The tension in Nami's chest immediately melted and she sank back in her chair. If she weren't trying to keep up appearances, she would've let out a sigh of relief.

"What did you say?" Hancock asked. It didn't come of quite as threatening as she wanted it to. "You want to stay here?"

He nodded. "That's what I said. I'm sure Washington DC would be cool, but it wouldn't be any fun without her! Nami's the first person I met after all that time, she's the one that lets me have, y'know, FUN!"

Bellemere looked from Luffy to Hancock, totally expecting to see her head engulfed in flames of rage, but instead the empress just looked stunned. Her hand moved to her mouth in surprise. Hancock had dealt with people swearing to bring her death. She had dealt with people spitting on her in defiance to her claims on territory. But never had anyone so casually dismissed her like this. No one had ever been given the chance to live in glory, and passed because it didn't sound as fun.

"I'm offering you glory, a chance to live at my side, in my palace. To be waited on, like a king… And instead you choose to live with this… skinny, pale, spastic girl?"

"Hey!" Nami and Bellemere shouted at the same time.

"You're damn right!" Luffy shouted back at Hancock.

"HEY!" Nami and Bellemere again shouted to Luffy this time.

The gears in Luffy's head creaked off some of the rust. "I-I mean-! That's-! Don't- Don't say mean things about Nami!"

"So what are you gonna do, Empress?" Bellemere said, her arms crossed. She was vaguely challeging Hancock at this point. "You gonna drag this kid away? You gonna make an innocent man do something he doesn't want to? That the kind of leader you are?"

Hancock had to will the embarrassed blush away from her cheeks. "Of course not. I would never… Hmph." She bit her lip, taking a deep breath and exhaling sharply. "I respect your bravery, speaking to me so clearly! If you wish to come to my domain one day, know that I will welcome you at any time."

"Well, thank you! I'm not ever gonna do that, but thanks!" Luffy said.

Hancock suppressed the hurt in her heart. She buried it deep like a healthy person would and turnd on her heels. "We've wasted enough time here. Good day to you, Bellemere. My people and I shall take our leave."

Before Hancock could reach the door, Bellemere sighed. "Wait. Wait, wait, you're already here. Come on, sit back down. We might as well… Try to work a thing out. You want tobacco, I'm sure you have some stuff we could use… Let's work out a trade process or something. No sense letting all this go to waste."

Hancock, still with her back to Bellemere, nodded. "Yes… Yes, there's no sense letting all this go to waste. We shall continue our discussion, then."

"And this time without as much hostility," Bellemere said, grinning. She tilted her head back, toward Nami and Luffy still standing in the kitchen. "Nami! Take your boyfriend and go show him around. Grown-ups gotta do grown-up stuff."

Nami was quick to grab Luffy's hand and he was quick to squeeze as tight as he could. Stepping outside was like being hit with a blast of freeing fresh air. The two of them felt lighter than ever.

"We can get you a place near my house, that won't be a problem. Everything's technically near my house since the town isn't that big but you know what I mean. I bet I can get you a spot on wall duty with me, if you're into getting up early. Maybe scav shifts or something..." Nami was rambling a little, leading him down the streets of her neighborhood. "Whatever you're into. We get a lot of downtime here, no matter what."

Luffy was rocking side to side as they walked, nodding enthusiastically at everything she said. Eventually Nami had to stop walking and turn to face him.

"Alright. I'm just gonna say it. When you say you want to stay here with me, do you mean... With me? Or just in the same area as me?"

"I wanna date you. Like everyone thinks we're already doing."

Nami's voice came out a bit strained. "Okay! Well! That was... I am still constantly caught off guard by your brutal honesty."

Luffy's head cocked to the side. "Why? Do you not want to?"

"No, I do! It's just most people tend to keep their feelings for someone else buried deep inside and they wait for the other person to pull them out."

"That's stupid. What a terrible way to deal with stuff like that."

Nami just shrugged, laughing. "That's just how it works, dude."

"So... Can we make out again?"

Nami responded by hooking her arms around Luffy's back. Their lips met and this time... This time they couldn't blame the alcohol on their complete inability to kiss properly. Teeth clacking, tongues prodding against each other awkwardly. They gave it a few attempts before agreeing to stop while they were behind.

"We'll figure it out as we go."

"Yeah, that... That sounds about right."

Even so, they still stayed wrapped in each other's arms. "Alright. I'll find you a place nearby. I don't think my mom would like me moving in with some guy she just met today? So we'll give THAT a little time."

"But until then we can hang out and date and kiss and stuff?"

"Yeah dude, all that romantic shit," she said, planting a kiss on the corner of his mouth.

So the world-saving thing didn't quite work out. There was no cure. No chance to eliminate the infection forever. But that wasn't so bad. They didn't really LOSE anything as a result. Even Robin couldn't complain too much when she was given her own house. And when Bellemere learned that her immunity to the virus made Robin invisible to the undead, Bellemere gave her a sweet gig as a scavenge leader.

Coby and Vivi also got what they wanted, a cushy house with a backyard and neighbors to talk to. It was a much, much better situation than the apartment, that was for sure. Nojiko didn't even intend to do it, but they ended up with a house that already had a swingset in the backyard. Which got them thinking about kids, and while they both agreed they would wait a little longer, talking about kids led them to talking about the method used to make kids, which led to taking advantage of not having neighbors directly on the other side of their bedroom walls.

They are having, like, so much sex you guys. Like, oh my God so much.

So is this the end of the story? Well, no, of course not. This is one particular incident in the lives of a bunch of different people. Their lives aren't just over after this, things will keep going. If they're lucky, things will keep going for a long time.

It's not a conclusion. It's another paragraph in the MLA-format essay of their lives. Robin didn't learn about her own personal worth, didn't form friendships with people who care about her, just for her story to end. Luffy and Nami didn't get together just to coast through the rest of their days. Coby and Vivi didn't settle in just to do nothing. The story isn't over until you're dead, and sometimes not even that's the end.

Maybe one day I'll tell you another story.


	11. Epilogue

Road Trip: A Tale of Zombies, Friendship, and Romance

Epilogue

Oh. You're back? What, you think I just have stories at the ready? You have to give me some time to prepare this shit.

Alright alright, give me a second, I'll think of something to talk about. How about I give you a little preview of what's coming next? Consider it like a sequel hook. You'd like that, right? Let's step forward in time, then. It's been about nine months since we last saw our... Well I wouldn't say heroes. Protagonists even seems excessive. It's been nine months since we last saw the guys we were following around. I take you now to an abandoned subdivision in Wall Township, New Jersey.

Her name was Baby 5. That wasn't her real name, obviously, that was just a stage name she used when she would DJ at clubs in France. Her real name wasn't important anymore, anyway. When she came under Boa Hancock's rule, she gave up any "normal" identity she once had. Now she was Baby 5, the gorgeous, sexy French maid/walking armory with the rockin' hot body and the poofy hair that everyone was totally super jealous of.

She was alone on the street of the subdivision. Somewhere in the middle of it, surrounded by empty houses and stillness. Behind her, several streets down, was the sound of construction. Construction for a project that I won't go into because that would ruin the suspense and that's not very fun, now is it? You'll just have to wait to find out, won't you? Haha ha hahaha.

Anyway, she was alone. She was alone, because she was investigating. She was investigating because she had heard the sound of a car somewhere nearby and since this area was supposed to be cleared off, that meant someone was trespassing.

She was almost glad someone was trespassing, working guard duty on the construction project wasn't the most fun, considering the only thing to guard against were the occasional zombie. At least a living soul might have a gun and they'd end up getting into a sick gunfight. Which she would, of course, win, as she was armed with an assault rifle slung over her shoulder, a shotgun on her back, and a pistol strapped to her thigh because it was hotter that way.

It was easy to find the trespasser. All she had to do was look out for the one car not covered in dust and leaves and rust from years of misuse. It also helped that he was standing in front of a house with his back to her, but you know, details. She cocked her rifle loudly for dramatic effect and shouted in as clear a voice as she could, "You zhere! Turn around slowly and raise your hands!"

There was no response. He kept staring ahead, ignoring her. This told her two things. The first was that he wasn't a zombie, as the sound would have drawn his attention. The second was that he was going to be the kind of asshole who ignored people with guns. "I said! Turn around! Let me see your face!"

Something in him snapped awake and he looked over his shoulder. "Are you talking to me?"

"Do you see anyone else around?! What are you doing here?! Zhis area is supposed to be off-limits to non-personnel!"

Yeah, I know it's amateurish to spell out accents phonetically but really you need to understand how thick hers is.

The man fully turned around, jumping a bit at the sight of the assault rifle pointed at him, and raised his hands in surrender. "What the hell?! What'd I do?!"

"I already told you! You are trespassing on, how you say, private property!"

The man raised an eyebrow. "Private property? This is MY house."

"Your house?"

With his hands still raised, he pointed down to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. "See the name on there? Trafalgar? That's me. Well, it's my parents' house but y'know. Close enough."

Baby had to adjust her gun, keeping it pointed on him as she made a quick, wary glance towards the mailbox. She didn't really expect him to suddenly pull out a hidden weapon or try to attack her, but she was in character as the hard-assed, suspicious survivor and she didn't want to blow that just yet.

The mailbox did indeed say "Trafalgar", painted on the side. That name sounded vaguely familiar. "And what is your first name?" She asked.

"Law. Trafalgar Law? Does that ring any bells?" He asked that like a has-been celebrity desperate for some recognition.

Baby paused for a moment, considering the possible ways she could know him. It finally dawned on her and she quickly lowered the rifle, keeping the barrel far away from him. "You! You are zhe doctor! Zhe one who was working on zhe zombies, no? You released zhose ah, how you say... Audio logs? You were on zhe news before zhe televisions went black!"

After Zombie Day, the news went hysterical. This was the story of a lifetime and they were going to report on every single bit of it. After all, they knew their time for broadcasting was limited. One of the biggest poster boys was Trafalgar Law, a surgeon who thought he lost a patient on the operating table when she suddenly sprang back to life. With a hole in her stomach. In the early days of the outbreak, he found himself in an army base in Texas, working on studying the biology and behavior of the undead. He was smart, clever, and had the right moral balance of being willing to save lives, but also willing to capture and dissect the living dead without issue.

Law also had the advantage of being skinny, covered in tattoos, and a facial expression that said the last time he had a good night's sleep was 2003. He was, in short, the prettiest face the news crews could put on TV. Before the outbreak became too much for the media, he had become something of a mascot for overcoming the zombies with science. His dark, brooding attitude made him a heartthrob.

For all the good that did. He clearly was not in Texas. That puzzled Baby, so she asked him, "What are you doing here? I zhought you were doing zhe research down in Texas!"

Law sighed. His eyes moved to the side, finding a patch of grass more interesting than the smoking hot French woman in front of him. "It's ah... It's a long story. Look, some things happened and I had my fill of Texas. I lost some, ah, things. It was a dark time. I wanted to just go home, so I made my way here."

Baby's eyes widened. "You came here alone, zhen?! Zhat is impressive!"

Law shrugged. "I wasn't always alone. I stopped in settlements along the way, hitchhiked a little. Took a while to get here, but... I don't really know what I expected to find." He gestured aimlessly to the house. "Of course no one would be here. My parents are... Gone."

Baby let out a sympathetic whimper. "I am sorry to hear zhat... We all lose people, no?"

"Yeah... I lost them to Hawaii."

Baby's soft expression faded. Hawaii was a safe zone, easily accessible when boats and planes still functioned. Because zombies could not swim or use boats properly, and because sharks did not give a shit if their food was a little past the expiration date, Hawaii was the perfect place to migrate to.

Granted, the lack of functional planes and boats made getting there now difficult, but last anyone heard, they were doing fine.

"Ah. Well, good for zhem!" She said cheerfully.

"Yeah. Good for them. I came here to kind of be alone, though, so... If you could give me some space?"

"Oh no no no, I cannot allow zhat. I told you, no? You are trespassing! I am afraid you will have to come wiz me for a... How you say, interrogation!" She said all this without dropping her bubbly, friendly demeanor.

"Interrogation...?" Law repeated the word in a way that echoed Baby's accent.

"Oh it is nozhing to worry about! You saw zhe construction on your way in, no? Zhat is why his area is off-limits! We just need to ask a few questions and zhen maybe you can... Oh, say, work for us?"

"Work for you…? Wait, hold on, I never agreed to anything like that! You're making a lot of assumptions," Law said, his hands raised automatically.

Baby's lips pursed in a faux-pout. "So you do not want food, shelter, community, safety… None of zhat sounds appealing to you?"

"It would sound way more appealing if it weren't offered by someone pointing a gun at me."

Baby raised an eyebrow, and then looked down at her own arms. Somehow in the midst of their conversation, she had automatically gone back to pointing her rifle at him. She quickly lowered it away from his direction and took her hand off the trigger to wave defensively. "Oh! I am so terribly sorry! It is a natural habit, no? It has been so long since I have had a… how you say, confrontation wizh a stranger! Would you believe I have not been in a single firefight in two monzhs?"

"Oh good, you're a psychopath. That makes me feel super comfortable to go with you. Alone."

Baby flashed him a coy smile, one that said "I'm threatening but in a cute, flirty way". She led him back down the block, trying not to think of him as a prisoner, because he wasn't. He was someone she was escorting back to safety so they could provide for him. He was absolutely not a scavenger from an enemy encampment that she was taking back to torture for information. He was a well-respected doctor that they could use if he was willing to help.

Still, she couldn't help nudging him in the back with the barrel of her rifle, screaming in her head "MOVE FASTER, RAIDER PIG". In reality, she giggled sheepishly when he turned around to see what her deal was. "Sorry!"

"Do you have any idea what muzzle discipline is?"

"Sure! It is when my friends yell at me to stop shooting because all zhe hostile targets are dead!"

Law gritted his teeth. This is what he was walking into? A settlement run by people like her? People who wore maid costumes and claimed territory arbitrarily and could potentially just shoot him if he said the wrong thing. And yet… Considering what he left behind, the sad fact was that it was a vast improvement.

So what did Law leave behind? Oh like I'd tell you now. How would that be any fun? Same for what the big construction project is. You'll just have to wait, because I'm seriously done this time. That's it. No more.

For real this time.


End file.
